Moho Featured Artist: Ben Windsor

Mario Quinones @ 2024-01-25

This week our Moho Featured Artist is Ben Windsor and the video clip "Resurrection" he created for the band Humble Francis! 🔥 Ben is an art director, motion graphics & animator who uses Moho as its main 2D animation software ✨

Tell us about you

I’m a senior art director / motion designer with a passion for character animation and illustration. I graduated from the University of North Florida in 2009 and worked primarily in print and branding until around 2013 when I saw the Franchise animated typeface promo from Animography (along with a ton of early-ish motion design work by the likes of Fraser Davidson, Markus Magnuson, and Animade to name a few), which all really inspired me to seriously pursue motion design and character animation specifically. Currently, I work with TigerLily as a lead animator/art director and also freelance/produce my own projects under the name "Ghostlygams."

Where do you get inspiration?

Cartoons! This past year was incredible for animation with Spiderverse, Mutant Mayhem, Scavenger’s Reign, Fiona & Cake, Star Wars Visions, and Blue Eye Samurai were all just incredible. And Hilda! Hilda is so wonderful from an art and palette perspective. I have yet to check out Unicorn Warriors, but Genndy Tartakovsky’s works have and will continue to be a huge inspiration and influence in my own, namely Samurai Jack.

Motion design / animation studios, especially ones that produce their own works, are also really inspiring. Art & Graft’s “At the Bar," Animade’s "Propz,” and all their short films—Oddfellow's 2016 reel still gives me chills—the combination of clips and music...

This might be getting a little long-winded, but finally, the rigging demo for Majid Shir Ali’s Robinhood is a level of rigging I’ll probably chase into retirement. It’s what convinced me to move over to the software. Hands down.

What’s your hardware setup?

Currently I’m rocking a stuffed to the gills M1 Max MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro.

(Watch full "Long & Short" film here)

What do you like best about Moho?

Moho’s most recent additions of liquid shapes and the improvements to frame by frame animation have been the real, immediate game changers for me. Vitruvian bones continue to present new solutions… It’s really hard to pick one feature. Ha!

How has Moho improved your pipeline workflow?

Speed is always a huge factor in my part of the field. Moho is an incredible tool for character animation because it’s so versatile. When you need a lot of characters, the rigging process can be so quick and economical. Conversely, you can add so much complexity to a primary rig—it's an awesome tool for when I need to animate anything that’s characterful. Sometimes I’ll start rigging in another software and get frustrated, “Why am I not animating yet?!”. Inevitably, I’ll almost always switch to Moho.

Can you talk about how the video clip “Resurrection for Humble Francis" was made using Moho?

In August 2022, I met with Ryan Hughes (of Humble Francis) over drinks to create a character-based set of visuals for one of their songs. After several emails back and forth, we fleshed out an idea for the “Frank” or Death character in the Resurrection music video. After that, I got to work and squeezed as much out of any free time I could master for storyboarding, character dev, illustration, animation, etc.

Moho was always top of mind; I knew I would be using it to rig all my dancers, pedestrians, a slew of profile pic heads, and multiple rigs for Frank (Death) himself. Version 14 was a godsend; I needed a quick and intuitive way to do several water, fire, and speed effects—liquid shapes were just the feature I needed. There’s also a tricky sequence where the character jumps off a building, and I approached it with a rig to FBF to rig handoff. The recent updates to frame by frame animation made it a lot easier to keep everything in Moho before composing, definitely streamlining the process.