This week our Moho Featured Artist is the Argentinian animation studio El Birque Animaciones 🔥  "Soñadores" is a children animated series broadcasted by Paka Paka channel and based on Liniers & Albert Pla's work. Moho is their 2D animation software when animating characters and much more! ✨ 

Tell us about yourself

We're an independent animation studio run by Juan Manuel Costa and Agustín Touriño, based in Sierras Chicas, Córdoba - Argentine. With over 15 years of experience, we've produced animated content for different formats. Our first steps were in Stop Motion technique, creating animations for Paka Paka, an Argentinian public TV channel, but also we did video clips for different music bands. In 2015, we worked in "Doña Ubenza" for Mariana Carrizo and thanks to this project, many doors opened for us.   

We're animation lovers and we're always interested to create and explore different techniques and aesthetics to make every project special. We love team work and we enjoy everything we do.

Where do you get inspiration?

Every project has its story and they're born in different ways. In the case of "Soñadores", it was an original proposal by Paka Paka with the idea of creating an animated series based in a Liniers book (a very famous Argentinian illustrator). To create the series' universe, we were inspired by public schools, where kids from different backgrounds study together and besides each one's reality, it inspire them to dream. In their dreams, the fictional characters find the proper answers to their own conflicts. 

We believe that dreaming is also a children's right, so this project inspires us to feel that we're making a small contribution to a more inclusive, tender and kindhearted world.

What’s your hardware setup?

 
I personally (Juan Manuel) use a MacBook air M1 and a PC i5-8400 with 32gb RAM and a RX580 8GB graphics card.

Anyway, for big projects with tons of characters we use other and most powerful machines.

What do you like best about Moho?

 
What we like best about Moho is its rigging system. It's simple and fast, and at the same time helps you making more complex rigs. Also, we feel very comfortable with the Timeline and its Keyframes organization.


 

How has Moho helped you in your creative process?

Moho allowed us to animate characters focusing in the acting, and we tried to keep the tenderness of the children's voices but always keeping Liniers style. Moho also gave us the chance to edit and improve the animation in a quick and easy way.

Can you talk about the “Soñadores" series and how it was made using Moho?

"Soñadores” has a very defined graphic style coming from Liniers and Albert Pla's book. We designed characters and scenarios in Photoshop, following Linier's aesthetic. The characters were redesigned in Moho to separate each rig and for having more flexibility to animate. The biggest challenge was to keep the style, simulating a real pencil and also we cared to keep the line's width in general shots and close-ups. For doing this, we learnt how to edit "Styles" in Moho but it was in a late stage of the production, so we had to go back a few steps and start over. Fortunately we made it on time! It's a great tool!

All the series was animated in Moho, including camera movements and backgrounds, in a way the scenes were exported ready to be edited as separated episodes if needed, so we didn't had to use a compositing software.

How has Moho improved your pipeline workflow?

In this project, we used Moho for the majority of the workflow production. We think it's very practical for making edits, animation changes specially because these projects are light and easy to share. At the same time, we used the "Shared assets" folder to be able to open files from different computers, so we can watch and edit animated scenes made by different animators.

  

Where can we find you?

 
Check out our website

www.elbirque.com

And don't forget to follow us on Instagram!

https://www.instagram.com/elbirque