We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Hannz Mulligan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hannz, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
I knew from a very young age that I would be an artist, but I waited to specify working in animation until my senior year of college. I was first inspired by Red Nose Studio to design and sculpt characters to be photographed for a children’s story, but when I photographed them, I wanted to see my characters move. I studied animation earlier in college but switched to sculpture and soon combined the two and focused my degree in Stop-Motion Animation. Working and learning alongside many talented artists in the field and seeing their ambition inspired me to build my own stop-motion company, Studio Pinch. From there I started to create my own content and continued to build a strong community of those who would ideate or problem-solve with me.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Studio Pinch is an independent studio focused on making stop-motion animated shorts and music videos for fun! We previz using digital tools such as blender, maya, photoshop and illustrator and we experiment using 3D printing technologies to get the most out of our puppets. We hope our stories and style make you smile as we slowly release more shorts. We want to grow our community of artists and storytellers and encourage them to meet in groups and chat online and ask questions. We are always available to teach!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I am currently going through a gigantic pivot as I sit here to tell you! I am a traditional sculpture artist, I work with my hands, tools, materials. I know clay and paint and chemicals. However, working in stop-motion is a culmination of many slow and tedious processes therefore I am pivoting toward the digital realm of sculpture. As more technologies advance and become widely available to the public, now is the time to learn and take advantage of digital workflows. Sculpting digitally allows for faster edits and turnaround time, printing allows for building a larger quantity of assets and digital previsualization allows for a more accurate and polished finished product. It’s never too late to upgrade my ttoolbox of skills.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Independent animators, now more than ever, have tools and technologies available that allow much smaller teams to create stunning work comparable to that of a larger studio. It is our mission at Studio Pinch to create quality work on an independent scale that make people laugh or enlighten them, or entertain them. We want to inspire other indies to tell their story and use the tools to bring us their vision. We are available to educate budding artists and connect them with our community as well as introduce them to helpful resources.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: studio.pinch
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannz-mulligan-ab7012a8/
- Twitter: HannzMulligan
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy9pLLfRWlLSPIDAFcoMa2w
Image Credits
all photos taken by Hannz Mulligan