Have you heard about the AniJam Challenge?

Each year, WONKY partners with Encounters Film Festival to bring you the 48hr creative animation mission. AniJam UK aims to inspire and showcase new work from emerging and established talent from across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The AniJam challenge is simple: create an animated film based around a specific theme in 48hrs. This year’s theme was ‘Together’ and each region took a slightly different angle on the theme.

48hrs to create an animation from start to finish? Sounds crazy right?

Not to our Brown Baggers - a team of our Manchester employees took on the challenge!

Animator Giulia Raniolo, Layout Artist Oliver Howe, 2D Designer Blanca Sobrino, 2D Animator Phil Jeffery and Background Artist Larisa Bumb decided to put the pedal to the metal when the studio received the invite from the festival to participate.

The group, nicknamed 'The Sharpies', were spearheaded by Background Artist Larisa Bumb, whom we chatted to for more detail on the process of creating their short for the challenge.

Larisa: Once in the competition, we were briefed with “Together” as the national theme and “Landmarks” as the regional theme. Everything we would send on the deadline would have to be done within those 48 hours.

We organized ourselves and divided the tasks, so we could know what we'd be working on and how we would do every step, making the process clearer and faster pipeline-wise.

To be fair, we gathered a few times before the actual competition to discuss possible problems we could have and potential solutions we could come up with, so that helped a lot when the time came because we already had a rough schedule. So, we more or less knew how much time to dedicate to each part of the process. It had changed a bit during the real process, but we stuck as much as we could to that original plan.

We are quite happy with the result and feel that it went well because we stuck to our roles and respected them. We had very collaborative feedback between each other but letting the experts in their area have control over the process for it was essential. We complemented each other very well with our different skillsets and in my opinion, we had a very well balanced team!

We all agreed that we would never have thought that what we came up with in the end would be the story we'd come up with. We suprised ourselves! We named it “Cross Culture” because of the germs being so cultural, going from one place to another!

Take a look at the finished animation below:

You can check out all of the AniJam entries here: AniJam18

And you can help to decide the winner of the Public Choice award by hitting the little star next to your favourite film! So get voting!