This week our Moho Featured Artist is Studio Carousel and their children TV series "The Smartians"🔥 It'll be premiered soon at a Serbian television network and all of the 2D animation has been done with Moho! ✨ 

Tell us about the team

Studio CAROUSEL is small team that’s getting bigger every day. This is our first MOHO based project so in the beginning it was one man band. Then my friend and coworker Aleksandar Filipov help me to prepare pitching for investors. After we won the first price on D Incubator competition in Serbia, out project The Smartians (Teslini Znanjoni) has been invested by some of the major Serbian Companies like Delta Holding. Then we started looking for talented artists and found Lea Embeli and Barbara Djokic who are responsible for character and background design. We already know talented screenwriters Dunja Petrovic and Sanja Urošević so we continue to work with them. 

As only a few people in Serbia work in MOHO we started the training and teaching MOHO to new talented animators. Young Animators Stela Mileusnic and Ivona Bundai have a different experience in animation (3D i Frame animation) but they both concurred MOHO very quickly and after a few months they started to taught other animators, and now we have team of 10 animators. Hosein Nazarpour and his team are a huge help to us with setup complex character rigs. Responsible for the most of storyboards is experienced “old school” animator Miroslav Jelić. Aleksandar Buzadzic - Buzge is in charge of the sound and music, he’s a professor and teaches sound design in an academy in Novi Sad. This is just a basic animation crew, but there are more than 30 amazing talents who participate in this project now.

What’s your hardware setup?

AMD Ryzen 7, Gefrce RTX 3060, 32 GB ram, pair of ASUS ProArt screens.

What do you like best about Moho?

Moho is a tool that allows us to do really fast production without compromise in quality of animation. Vector and bitmap images both works great in rigs and on scene, so we can easy achieve particular style. Also I like the fact that has has affordable price for small productions.
One of my favorite facts about Moho is that after it changed owners it continued to develop in the right direction.

How has Moho helped you in your creative process?

I have always loved tools that allow me to transfer the idea on the screen fast, and animation in Moho is unbelievably fast.
Once you setup the rigs you quickly get to the finale animation. That is important not just because of the budget, but also because creative process can go on undisturbed. New tools such as Vitruvian bones, or wind dynamics makes time consuming animation better looking and easer to achieve.

Can you talk about "The Smartians" series and how it is made using Moho?

The Smartians is story about little pets like robots, and their inventor is Nikola Tesla. They live in Teslandia – the world of Tesla’s Inventions. When a girl Puzzle (7 years) discover portal to Teslandia, she becomes keeper of Smartians and savior of Teslandia World. This is big project and animation is just a part of it. We’ve also started production of creative toys, books, and video game.

We use MOHO for all animations, characters and props, and for big part of composting as our Backgrounds are 3D scenes made in Blender. First we prepare Moho rigs of designed characters, record actors, made animatic.. and then start with animation in Moho. When we don’t have 3D camera movements we just import flat background pictures in Moho, and use simple camera movements. When we have 3D camera move in scene, then we composting scene in AE where we can easy import camera data form Blender. We also have pre-rendered animation FX, that we apply over the animation in Moho, or in AE.
Everything is organized in folders that follow the animation structure where every episode is split in scenes which are split in shots. Same organization and naming convention applied to animation, editing, sound, etc.

How has Moho improved your pipeline workflow?

Moho allows a small team to get to professional result in a short time. Beyond that, animation in Moho is easy to learn so it is possible to extend the team quickly. The possibility that one final animation can be easily applied on other characters also accelerates the whole production. Organization of timeline and layers is getting better in every Moho version. I’m always pleasantly surprised what you guys in MOHO add in new updates. We are experimenting now with importing 3D objects from Blender, so still not sure if we can include that in production. It will be cool if we could import entire 3D scene and us it as a background for our rigs.

For the future update we hope to see improved version of bitmap brushes, so the rig animation could be even easier to mix with traditional frame animation.

Where can we follow your work?

Instagram: @tesliniznanjoni / @carousel.anim

Website:

https://www.smartians.rs/