Golden Wolf Are Leading The Pack

What do Donald Duck’s nephews, the Chilean national football team and stormtroopers all have in common? Well, aside from being excellent dressers, they have all been animated by Emmy-nominated London based animation studio, Golden Wolf!

With work that lives in the space between irreverent humour, intensely dynamic action and psychedelia. The studio's unique and youthful perspective has been applied to global commercial campaigns, opening titles, music videos, AR filters, VR experiences and social media campaigns.

Since opening their doors in 2013, their primary focus has been on the US market, where they’ve seen some great success with projects for major brands such as Nike, Disney, PlayStation, NBA, and Cartoon Network.

After seeing that they’d recently signed with Stink, we caught up with Golden Wolf’s Co-founder/Creative Director Ingi Erlingsson to chat about how the studio started, their eclectic body of animated work, and future projects.

Tell us about the formation of Golden Wolf, and how you got started in the business?

Back when I graduated in 2006 I went to work for a small illustration studio based in Southsea called ilovedust. Over the following 4 years we went from 4 people to 20 and along the way we started developing an animation department within the studio.

Convincing animators to move to Southsea, as picturesque as it is, is a tricky thing to do, so we rented a tiny space on Curtain Road in Shoreditch and I moved up to head that up. Within 2 years we’d grown to 15 people and had moved offices twice. 

At this point our work was starting to segue into a fairly different direction to ilovedust’s print work, making it tricky to position the company for both illustration and animation, so we made the call to split the studio into two, ilovedust for design and Golden Wolf for animation. We were absolutely petrified at first, thinking we were probably making a mistake to leave the brand equity of the ilovedust name behind, but luckily it’s been pretty plain sailing since.

The Golden Wolf studio just signed with Stink, how are you planning on expanding your horizons with this move?

Yeah we’re super excited about this move. We’ve always admired Stink’s work, but up until recently the worlds of live action and animation had always seemed very separate to us, so we hadn’t really seen signing with them as an option. Right now it feels like the industry has moved on an awful lot, with a focus on great content creation, regardless of format, so it felt like the perfect time to team up with Stink. 

We’re planning on working with Stink to push into markets that have previously been unexplored for us, such as the rest of Europe and even the UK, as we’ve never had a sales pipeline here. From a creative point of view we’re keen to build a reputation for not just animation specifically, but our unique point of view, which we believe we can apply to any format, live action included.

How is the animation team at Golden Wolf structured for each project? Who are the key team members involved in a production?

We like to think of our process as a kind of organised chaos. We have a studio-style hierarchy with animators, designers, art directors and creative directors, but the leadership can vary from project to project, depending on size, style and scope. We love the fact that we can give anyone, from the most senior members of our leadership team to interns, a chance to direct projects. We’re primarily concerned with finding the best creative, regardless of where it comes from.

You recently collaborated with Disney and Marshmallo on the ‘Fly’ video, aswell as working on last years reboot of the ‘Ducktales’ intro. How did these projects come about? And how well have they been received?

The Senior Vice President of Short Content at Disney is a good friend of mine, so when he'd had a meeting with Marshmello about collaborating with Disney he immediately called me to talk about what we could do. We love working with the Disney guys and have such a fluid relationship already, so it was great fun to work on.

We got on Disney Television Animation’s radar after having done idents for a bunch of their shows for Disney XD, a channel primarily airing animated shows. We’d done a couple of cameo sequences for shows like Star VS the Forces of Evil, so when the DuckTales titles came up we were already well acquainted with those guys. Obviously it was impossible to turn down, we’d all grown up on that show, so it was a real dream come true to be able to contribute to something that will live on for the next generation.

Golden Wolf have dabbled with music videos in the past with artists such as Steve Aoki, Zedd, Dog Blood and Major Lazer to name a few. Are these type of projects something you want to do more of in the future?

Absolutely, music videos have always been the one platform that has allowed us to push our wildest ideas and develop new techniques. 

We really enjoyed the creative work you did for Watch Dogs 2. What was the brief for this project? What was your favourite part of the project?

The Watch Dogs 2 project was a really fun one. We’d all been obsessively playing Watch Dogs 1 when the call came in, so it all seemed a little too good to be true.

Initially we were just helping them develop graphics for internal presentations and helping them figure out what the visual and animated style of the Ded Sec gang. Over time as the game developed we got to contribute to the graphics within the game, including the menu screen and the opening sequence of the game.

Our favourite part of the project was to get to spend a week at Ubisoft’s Montreal office, working alongside the design and game teams, getting to see all the inner workings of how it came together.

The team at Golden Wolf are masterful at executing short form content, would you be up for doing some feature length projects in the future?

This is something we’ve talked about a lot in the studio over the years. We definitely aspire to work on feature films to some degree, be it a title sequence or a couple of scenes, but to undertake an entire film would potentially change the core of the studio too much. We get so much of our energy from the fast turnaround projects, so we’d need to make sure that we weren’t compromising that element.

The campaign you worked on for Nike Vapormax was great, how much freedom are you allowed from a brand like Nike on a project like this?

Nike has been one of our most consistent clients over the years, so we’ve been lucky enough to develop a really close working relationship with the creatives there. This means that we’re able to work with them on the creative for projects and give our two cents, too. For the Vapormax project they came to us with a initial idea and a moodboard of what they were thinking for the spots. Coincidentally we’d been working on a personal project that lined up pretty perfectly with the creative, so we augmented that to fit the brief. It was super rewarding as it allowed us to create something that was really well aligned with what we were already wanting to create.

Which projects are you most proud of and why?

We love all our children equally, haha! 

There are definitely a few projects that stand out, mainly for what they did for us as a studio and helped get our foot in the door on bigger and better things. One particular project is the Cartoon Network 20th birthday animation, which featured practically every character from Cartoon Network’s history, from Dexters lab, Johnny Bravo, to Adventure time and Scooby Doo. We worked closely with their VP of design who helped us shape the story and the visual language. At the time we were relatively new to cel animation and we hadn’t done anything even remotely as ambitious as this before, but the Cartoon Network guys put an awful lot of faith into us and it came out really great.

If it wasn’t for this project we would never have gotten onto projects like the Powerpuff Girls and DuckTales title sequences.

How would you describe the 'singature style' of a Golden Wolf animation?

We try as much as possible to vary the visual style of the projects that we do, although there is definitely a through line in all of our work. We try to approach all of our projects with the same point of view, which is about creating edgy, energetic and youth-oriented work, in whatever format is the best fit: animation, live action, motion graphics etc.

What’s coming up next for you and the Golden Wolf team?

Besides our recent signing with Stink and the global push we’re planning to do with them, we’re about to open a studio in New York towards the end of July, which will allow us to work more closely with our US-based clients, as well as tap into the local talent pool.