Moho Featured Artist: Sinnema

Mario Quinones @ 2022-02-09

This week our Moho Featured Artist is Sinnema and their DKH Campaign🔥 Sinnema is a Berlin based animation studio and they use Moho as their main 2D animation software ✨

Tell us about yourself

I am Adam Yassour, an animation director and one of the founders of Sinnema Animation Studio. I founded the studio alongside Simon Reichenbach and Julia Bruton in 2016 in Berlin, Kreuzberg. From the beginning we focused our efforts on character animation, storytelling and high quality production. It was also important for us that the animations we create have a meaningful message and a positive impact, over the years we had the privilege of working with famous NGOs like Greenpeace, Save the Children, Amnesty and Oxfam.

Where do you get inspiration?

At the studio we get a lot of inspiration and motivation from other studios that we admire such as Giant Ant, Oddfellows, Gunner, the Line, Golden Wolf and many more. We also follow a lot of talented designers on instagram to stay updated and find new ideas or partners to work with. Personally, i have always been a film geek and tend to go back to the old classics, such as the era of german expressionism from the 20s (Metropolis and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for example), and also film directors like Kubrick or Paul Thomas Anderson are a great source of inspiration and film education. When thinking about how to direct a scene i like to listen to music, often to actual soundtracks of films or series that I love.

What’s your hardware setup?

We have workstations that have good processors and lots of RAM, this is mostly relevant for after effects or 3d, in our experience, Moho doesn't require much performance power. Otherwise we animate using Cintiqs and Wacom tablets. We have a Server that can also automatically synchronise locally with our computers. This allows us to work remotely and also with freelancers from all around the world.

What do you like best about Moho?

What we like most about Moho is its flexibility. We are a studio that works with different art directors that have different styles, and we have many different projects that have different requirements. Moho is a tool that can fit into almost any kind of 2d project or 2d style.

How has Moho helped you in your creative process?

We see ourselves as a studio that mostly focuses on character animation and storytelling. At the beginning we used to work only with After Effects combined with a lot of plugins such as Duik, Rubber hose, Joystick and Slider and the list goes on... Working this way meant that we had no real time playback or onion skin when animating. That is why we were always on the look out for a great character animation software. In Moho we finally found a software that focuses on character animation and cut out rigging. We found Moho to be so intuitive that we could immediately learn it on the go, while incorporating it into our animation pipeline. Afterwards Moho had become a pillar of our working process in almost all of our 2d projects. Moho enabled us to work much faster and to deliver a high quality of animation also under tight deadlines.

Can you tell us about the DKH Campaign project and how it was made with Moho?

This campaign was a collaboration with Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO). The objective of this important campaign is to raise awareness to the problems refugees face all over the world and how Diakonie can help them to overcome these struggles. Our talented art director Idan Barzilay created beautiful designs that we had a lot fun animating in Moho. In this project we wanted to combine cut out animation with frame by frame animation to make the movement more dynamic. It was important for us that the two animation techniques remain cohesive and that there would not be a noticeable difference. Moho has enabled us to achieve this combination, we could even rig frame by frame animated arms to a cut out animated body, or have in the same shot a character that is animated frame by frame and characters that are cut out, without it seeming a bit weird or uncanny.