This week our Moho Featured Artist is the very talented Italian animation studio Justeleven! 🔥  They use Moho as their main 2D animation software ✨ 

Tell us about yourself

We founded Justeleven in 2006. It’s a small studio based in Rome. In the early years we were specialized in 3D animation for TV commercials. Then we started making visual effects for some Italian films. Since 2009 we've been making many of the promos, graphics and commercials for Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Cartoonito and Boing. In 2021, we conceived, wrote and produced an original puppet animation series called "Bo & Bobo Show" visible on Boing tv channel and on the BoingApp.

Where do you get inspiration?

I do this job thanks to (or because of, depending on the point of view) the masterpieces of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Unfortunately in the broadcasting industry, due to the fast pace and the strict rules of channel identity, there is not much room for inspiration. A happy exception was the "Bo & Bobo Show" series, for which we had carte blanche on almost everything.

What’s your hardware setup?

Our PCs have the following specifics:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7800X CPU @ 3.50GHz 3.50 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
Display: Dell KV2718D

What do you like best about Moho?

I always tell my associates that Moho was the best investment we could ever make. It is a light software and easy to learn and extremely flexible. With Moho we have always found a way to solve problems and achieve our goals, also thanks to a very active and creative community. I can say that Moho has helped us in countless productions, both for small interventions and for entire commercials or video productions. I'm passionate about traditional 2D animation and Moho allows me to get very close to that style in the fastest way possible. I also love the unexpected “tricks” that Moho can provide, I am particularly referring to the "creative uses” such as those of Victor Paredes.

How has Moho helped you in your creative process?

As I said I love 2d animation especially the traditional one. I adore the sketchy and quivering lines, the erasures, the shadows that the drawings of the acetate sheet project on the underlying layers, the grain of the film. In order to achieve that style I consider Moho as an essential part of my creative process. I usually imagine my projects according to what I will be able to achieve with Moho. I also love working with Moho because it provides all the tools I need to make everything looking more "hand drawn style" in the fastest way possible.

Can you talk about the “Bo & Bobo Show" series and how it was made using Moho?

Our client asked us to find a way to value the two characters Bo & Bobo, testimonial of the Boing channel.

We weren't asked to do it with a specific technique, but it had to be effective.
I was surprised and really happy when the client chose the most classic of all the options we gave them: puppets.

Since then, for the next two years we’ve constantly worked on it, delivering 70-minute of puppet animation divided into mini-episodes. The two puppets are made of foam rubber and fleece. The scripts of the first episodes were written always keeping in mind the technical limits of the puppets. That’s why they were always set in one room. Moreover, for most of the episodes I had to animate them alone due to the COVID pandemic and, having no more than two arms, I filmed them individually following an audio track to be able to synchronize their actions. After gaining confidence with the technique we began to think of more "daring" stories knowing that we could also rely on Moho to overcome many of the limits of a live action puppet animation. For example, we couldn't have done the fishing episode because Bobo (the green puppet) wasn't expected to have legs. So I’ve split an image of Bobo in layers, rebuilt some hidden parts, drawn the legs and finally rigged and animated in Moho. We can say that it became a puppet within a puppet.

In another episode a frog was rigged and animated very quickly using smart bones on a still image. Also the fishes in the aquarium episode have been built with Moho.

How has Moho improved your pipeline workflow?

It's amazing how, every time we ask ourselves "How the hell are we going to do this?" the answer is often "Simple, let’s do it with Moho".

Moho has often helped us to overcome many technical limits, but above all, having to deal on a daily basis with the undelayable deadlines of broadcasts, it helps us to work rapidly, reducing costs (unfortunately those of the client) and respecting delivery times.

Where can we find you?

Website: www.justeleven.it
Twitter: @Justeleven
LinkedIn: Matteo Loi
Facebook: Matteo Loi