Chilean Animation

A series of animated micro-stories to promote Chilean talents and landscapes is one of the most recent works of the Chilean studio Smog, led by Pablo González and Moisés Arancibia. A challenging project made for Marca Chile, which Arancibia, creative director of the studio, describes as a balance between the story, its coherence, and its unique seal.

Tell us a little about the project that led to these animations.

Marca Chile is a foundation in charge of promoting everything Chile has to offer to the world, and as part of its visual development they invited us to create a series of animated pieces that, based on the existing branding, would serve as ID’s to build a flexible and expandable graphic ecosystem. This is how it was born our first idea of creating an iconographic system of animated micro-stories that coexist harmoniously with the Logo. These mini-pieces were the DNA of everything that followed.

How challenging is it to work on a country’s image?

Well, it is quite challenging indeed since there are several edges at stake and several voices that constantly give their opinion to fulfill the required expectations. Probably the most complex thing is to achieve the balance between being coherent in the story you want to tell and at the same time achieve something that feels unique, with its own stamp. But the most interesting thing is precisely what happens once you find that point in the balance, because that’s where the project begins to take on a life of its own.

Why use animation as a tool for these issues?

The first thing people tend to think is that animation allows you to play with the most varied visual elements within the same language, something that in other formats can be an important limitation, which is very true… but personally I see an enormous value and potential in the narrative capabilities of animation. As a tool, it has the ability to encapsulate stories under a language that feels personal and universal at the same time, where characters, places and situations are graphed in a way that is broad enough to be identified globally and at the same time specific enough to be recognized in their particular way. And all unified on the same level and complemented by a series of visual/narrative artifacts (transitions, typography, etc.) that allow the experience to be elevated to unexpected places.

You can watch all the work of Smog in its website smog.tv