Halloween is in full swing here at Brown Bag Films, and we're celebrating the best way we know how - with animation! The Animation Jam is an internal Brown Bag Films event where our creative team comes together to create a collective piece of art for fun.The only guidance given to each participant is to create their own original animation, using a specific colour palette and fit into a theme – this time being ‘Halloween’. All the individual pieces were collected and edited together to make this spooktacular short video.

The team loved taking part in the Animation Jam – and you can read about their inspiration behind each animation below!

Iobhar Stokes Rodriguez - Animator

I've always loved Halloween and its history of being an ancient Celtic festival. I thought it would be a good theme for our first Animation Jam at Brown Bag Films because, from college I saw that animators seemed to get really excited for Halloween, making costumes and dressing up. I hoped it would be the same here.

The aim of the Jam is to encourage artists to make their own personal animations and I was delighted to see such a huge turn-out for it!

My animated piece is a commentary on the transport system in Ireland and the rising cost of brooms. As the cost of brooms increases, more witches are choosing to take public transport to work, putting more pressure on an already overcrowded transport system.

Nuno Nobre - 2D Animator

Here is a “Trick or treat” gone wrong! The Ghost of the Old Man didn't treat the kids with candy! So, the kids just got back at him with some Tricks. (Spoiler Alert: The little witch was the one to throw all the eggs �� )

Guilherme Brenner - Senior FX Artist

Being an FX artist, I always try to find ways to animate 2D FX and create a piece around that. This time I looked into a new Halloween music duet, released by my two favorite Brazilian drag queens, Pablo Vittar, and Gloria Groove, called “Ameianoite”, and created an animated loop of two spooky characters, a pumpkin, and a smoky ghost.

Mark Rusk - Episodic Director

I decided to animate a spider, as arachnids are a generally recognisable trope of Halloween iconography, so it required less thought and effort to come up with an original concept, even though I personally am not scared by spiders.

I thought it would be good to have the spider dangling from a thread so I wouldn’t have to worry about foot contacts or any of that difficult stuff.

Manu Mathew - Animation Director

My daughter loves Halloween, so I've always wanted to do a quick animation with a Halloween theme. I was thrilled to make this animation. During the weekends, I worked on this 2D animation on my iPad with the goal of keeping it simple, doable, but also a little spooky.

We appreciate the Animation Jam's team for the brilliant idea!

Thomas Martin - Compositor

I was inspired by the pumpkin enemies from the PS1 game 'Medievil', I tend to replay it this time of year.

Jenni Clifford - Production Coordinator

Mine is just a simple little animation - with cute Halloween characters - I haven't animated since college so it was nice to have a bit of Halloween themed inspiration to encourage me to dust the cobwebs off and try out the animation tools in ProCreate.

Stephen O’Connor - Art Director

I'm on a John Carpenter buzz at the moment. Retro Wave, Synth Wave and Electronic Ambient all was on the playlist as I began to paint up this image up, pixel art was an extension if that aesthetic choice too. If you play some of this type of music and watch my little clip you hopefully will get that same vibe too.

Thank you to all of our talented team members who participated in making this Halloween video, and to the Art Jam team for putting this together!