Introducing: Aniverse

It’s a new year and with that a brand-new signing from Jelly. Introducing Ahmet Iltas – Founder and Director of Aniverse, a creative studio that specialises in animation, motion graphics, and visual storytelling. Oh, and we should also mention they create beautifully lit and atmospheric artwork that we can’t help but drool over… but we’ll let their work do the talking.

To help us get to know a bit more about himself and the studio, Ahmet has shared with us how Aniverse came about, their style and environments, favourite projects and why he loves what he does. Enjoy!

Ahmet:

Before Aniverse, I worked with lots of agencies and production companies both globally and more locally. I started out in my career as an illustrator but soon discovered that it was moving pictures that excited me. After spending the last 3 years of my career as a Director, I created Aniverse.

Although focusing more on Direction, I still love the creative process in design and illustration. If I had to describe our (Aniverse’s) style I’d say that we love playing with light and shadow, it’s one of our core focuses’ and passions and we try to reflect this in our films as much as we can. Like all studios, we have different styles of work online, depending on the style that the client may have wanted, but the projects where we can create dreamy atmospheres and beautiful lighting are the ones we tend to keep online. Mainly because it’s super fun for us to work on.

In short, the buzzwords for our style/aesthetic are – colour, light and shadow.

When we receive a brief on a new project, it’s super important that we clearly define what the client wants in that brief. This helps us understand it better and steer it in the right direction. For our work with Turkish Airlines the agency gave us some style suggestions and a very clear brief but allowed us creative freedom with the style of the artwork, enabling us to play around much more with the colours and atmosphere. We were super happy with the end result as were the client!

It sounds weird but one of the best things about animation (for me anyway) is seeing the client’s reaction and that they’re happy with the result. It’s very motivating and helps drive you towards doing something even better for the next job.

When the next job does come around, I tend get a lot of inspiration from great artists, dreamy and atmospheric photography (with great lighting), but mostly from my little girl. She has an incredibly colourful world and imagination. Her room is a riot of colours and quirky characters – easy to draw inspiration from.

With regards to characters, to me character development is one of the most important parts in any project – because the touches you make on the character are incredibly important in being able to convey the mood and overall sense of the project to the viewer. How a character looks, acts and reacts directly affects the end result of the work. That’s why character design is an area that I particularly care about and continually strive for improvement in. Always difficult yet fun at the same time… like a super-hot taco!

Although I love all of the projects Aniverse has created, everyone always has a favourite work of theirs. Mine is our ‘Betternet’ project for Samsung. We had the chance to work with the amazing and open-minded team at Cheil agency. The script was powerful, as the topic was about awareness of the correct use of the internet… Ironic to hear this from a tech brand but they were very meticulous about children’s internet usage habits.

We were given complete creative freedom for both the art and animation, So, we utilised this freedom to get into the tone and mood of the script. I’m still super proud to be a part of that project.