On My Radar: Red Knuckles

Red Knuckles is an London-based independent creative animation studio offering collaboration with ad agencies, production companies and feature film studios to bring TV Commercials, cinematics, music videos and feature development to life.

Founded by creative directors Mario Ucci and Rick Thiele after years working at Passion to build their experience in the field of animation, the company continues to push the boundaries with award-winning work.

Below, Ucci and Thiele talk to shots about what it is that inspires them in their daily lives in this latest latest creative Radar interview.

What’s the best ad campaign you’ve seen recently? 

MU: We love all of the Chipotle films. Johnny Kelly’s Back to the Start and Moonbot’s Scarecrow. Both have that killer combination of great storytelling partnered with beautiful craft-led animation.

What website(s) do you use most regularly and why?

MU: Motionographer for design, animation and new talent discovery.

RT: Vimeo for our daily dose of inspiration from worldwide animators and filmmakers.

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought and why? 

MU: The studio has been fawning over our most recent purchases; a Blackmagic cinema camera and Canon 5dm2 for all our 2.5k needs.

Facebook, Instagram or Twitter? 

MU: All of the above. We enjoy our social ecosystem.

What’s your favourite app on your phone and why? 

RT: Autodesk’s Sketchbook to sketch that idea before it’s gone. Duolingo so we can know what the French and Italian artists are saying about us.

MU: Wikipedia so we are never left out of a conversation.

What’s your favourite TV show and why? 

MU: It has got to be Breaking Bad for bringing back the 1970s American cinema visual and narrative style. They are doing in television what we would love to be seeing in films.

What film do you think everyone should have seen? 

MU: With the impossible task of picking just one film, I have chosen a film that has so many elements of animation and shows contemporary characters in a brand new perspective - Run Lola Run.

Where were you when inspiration last struck? 

MU: Our inspiration comes from everywhere to the everyday things. From the extremes of travelling to São Paulo and drinking Caipirinha’s on the beach to being amongst the thriving metropolis of Tokyo to dressing my three children in the morning before school.

What’s the most significant change you’ve witnessed in the industry since you started working in it?

RT: The technology has progressed so vastly since we started out. Once upon a time we would photograph models and environments on set and then use a manual approach to create them in CG. Now the use of real time 3D multi-camera scanning in live action studio shoots has moved this process onto a level we might never have thought possible.

If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be? 

MU/RT: Simply enough time to make projects to the best of their creative expectation and potential.

What or who has most influenced your career and why? 

RT: Japanese animation first and foremost when it comes to breaking the boundaries of what animation can do as a medium. More recently the films of Wong Kar-Wai and particularly the cinematography work of Christopher Doyle has inspired. He is probably our main reference when it comes to staging and lighting of a shot.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… 

RT: We draw with the right hand but kick a ball with the left leg. This makes it very hard to beat us Brazilians here on the advertising football pitch.