Retro Robots From North London

However, Shynola can definitely throw down a sketch. Richard "Kenny" Kenworthy (who does UK spot work via London's AKA Pizazz), Baws, Jason Groves and Chris Harding graduated from the Kent Institute of Art & Design where they studied illustration. It was their shared interest in film and drawing that steered them towards animation.

Now, on the heels of producing six 15-second Nike ads for Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, OR, Shynola is creating an ad for telecom company Orange through London's WCRS. They are represented in the US by bicoastal Oil Factory Inc.

Shynola's first televised work appeared on Channel 4's Dope Sheet animation program. Soon after, UK triphop impresario James Lavelle of Mo Wax Records drafted the team to create an animated short for his UNKLE project. Shynola produced a film spanning from retro, pixelized characters to harsh-lined, pointy-headed creatures (which also manifest as spark shooting CG robots). More blocky retro 80s computer graphics work was produced for some socially aware MTV idents.

A touching short film, The Littlest Robo made the rounds at international animation festivals and before long the group was hired to produce music videos: Morgan's "Flying High," Quannum (featuring DJ Shadow) "I Changed My Mind" and the mind-blowing "On the Double" for Grooverider vs. Cypress Hill.

The team pumps out its non-uniform CG creations using Alias|Wavefront's Maya and an Adobe grab bag (Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere). But the gear is secondary to the references the group culls from its encounters with music, film, TV and pop culture. Harding describes how the germ of the idea for the video game-meets-anime robotic conflict of the Grooverider vs. Cypress Hill promo came together.

"Gideon and Kenny went to a festival in Japan and came back with Gundam toys (Gundam is a long-running Japanese cartoon based around giant robots); they were far bigger than we remembered," says Harding. The track is a blend of drum & bass and hip hop and the action-packed animation produced by Shynola blends with the music's frenetic pace. Set in a CG neo-Tokyo battle-scape, two gangster robots blast their way through hordes of mechanical adversaries, in the end facing off against a gigantic boss. The whole Shynola team is Japanese animation fans citing Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Lone Wolf and Cub and Perfect Blue as some of their favorites.

As advertising becomes more of a focus for Shynola, the group is adapting to working from ideas and characters other than their own.

"Promos are more like short films and we are left to our own devices and can be more creative; with adverts the ideas are already planned out," says Kenworthy. Shynola, he says, views itself as a creative team, preferring to develop its own characters and ideas. Often, concepts from videos are picked up by agency creatives and repackaged as ads -- the Natwest ad, "Fishing Line," out of TBWA London was a repurposing of the Quannum video.