#hbo documentaries

The public may believe abuses within the US prison system are a thing of the past, but filmmakers Andrew Janecki and Charlotte Kaufman show those abuses are happening now in their new doc The Alabama Solution.

Music Box: Woodstock 99 – Peace, Love, and Rage (dir. Garret Price).

The talent, power, poetry and perseverance is truly inspiring

Tina Turner/Anna Mae Bullock, the story of her life lifts me, what a beautiful voice

I’m in awe

films seen in 2017;

Interview with Freddy Arenas

Freddy Arenas is a director and animator working out of his studio in Brooklyn, NY. He works for a variety of clients and on personal projects, creating short films and gifs involving animation and motion graphics. We contacted Arenas for a short interview after he shared some of his work with us. Learn more about Arenas’ inspiring work and about motion graphics after the jump.

AF: What do you do for a living and what do you hope to do with design and animation in the future?

Arenas: I work as a director producing projects both personal and for clients from my studio in Brooklyn, NY. At the moment I’m working on a couple of scripts and storyboards for personal short films parallel to the work for clients. My most recent project for a client was a collaboration with HBO Documentaries, for their film Risky Drinking (below). Originally the project was to create thirteen clips that will help illustrate the scientific facts of the film as well as some hypothetical situations. Since the clips were meant to support the documentary narrative arch, I’ve edited some of them together in an effort to show a little bit of what the film is about. You can see the project here.

AF: You do some really cool animation and gifs. What is your process like? What programs do you use and how do you come up with your ideas?

Arenas: Thanks, I really appreciate your interest in my work. I try to keep things balanced between my professional work (projects for clients) and my personal projects (self-motivated pieces  that I do on my spare time). Most of my professional projects are longer format animations where the client gives me a brief and I create the narrative and visual script. Whereas my gifs I use to try out illustration and animation techniques or quickly layout narrative ideas. The inspiration for my gifs comes from my personal experiences and interests, either hobbies of mine or bits of stories I’m planning on developed further down the road. For production, I use Adobe Photoshop and a Wacom Cintiq to create the storyboards and block the animation, design and style developing I get done with a mix of Photoshop, Illustrator and Cinema 4D. And for the actual production of the animation most of the times is a mix of Cinema 4D for 3D characters and some environment layouts, Photoshop for the cel animation and Adobe After Effects for the 2D animation and compositing.

AF: Tell us more about motion graphics. Some of our readers are very familiar, and others less so. What can you tell us about motion graphics as a medium? How is it done and what is it used in?

Arenas: I think motion graphics is a form of animation, I’m not sure if it’d be a whole other thing but I guess the main difference is that motion graphics is more abstract and relies on typography and graphics to communicate ideas, whereas narrative animation uses characters and environments  to tell stories. I’m aware there’s a big discussion going on about the difference between animation and motion graphics, but I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it. I think it’s all animation and I’ve stridden to blur the lines between them both as much as I can. Motion graphics is mainly used for show and film titles, product demos, infographics and other pieces that may need to tell a more abstract story. The most common workflow is creating style frames that would serve as a design guide for the piece, after that, some studios would do storyboards but others would go straight into creating animatics with the style frames and then just figure out transition during the [research and development], production process or animation.

AF: Where can people see more of your work and maybe contact your for your work or otherwise?

Arenas: My website is freddyarenas.com, here I share a selection of my professional work and some of my process, storyboards, gifs with pencil tests and other r&d (research and development) done during the process. I have a Tumblr page where I post my animation and illustration experiments. And more recently I’ve been posting some live action experiments and other design and animation explorations on my Instagram.

We’d like to thank Freddy Arenas for taking the time to talk with us and explain his process. If you’ve got unique, inspiring or professional work that you’d like to share with the community, let us know.