About us

Head Gear Animation would be partnering with Stop Motion Dept and Vinit Borrison for this project.

We have a long history of working together! Head Gear and Stop Motion Dept have partnered on Stop Motion Animation projects big and small and Vinit is our favourite live action go-to DOP.

We love to bring fantastic stories to life. Building models, puppets and sets, using all kinds of materials and then nudging them, frame-by-frame in front of a camera makes us a happy animation studio. From designing and storyboarding, to animating and directing, we always bring humor, charm and warmth to all of our projects.

With Head Gear/Stop Motion Dept/Vinit Borrison, we walk you through the entire process from start to finish and make sure everyone has as much fun as we do along the way.

The examples below demonstrate our craft.

Approach

Mushrooms are so cool, and they already totally look like little people. So a little stop-motion animated fungi character seems like a great approach to tell this Ryze Coffee story.  We would sculpt and build a puppet to scale, referencing different types of fungi, with all the hand-made imperfections consistent with the texture of a real mushroom. 

After designing and building our little guy, further character development (i.e. how this puppet moves and animates) can be done based on the live-action shoot,  so the mushroom character can fully integrate with its environment and the other real actors, and project the emotional resonance that is so essential here. All animation will be done after the live-action shoot is wrapped, so that we’ll have all the lighting and other references to seamlessly integrate our stop-motion character into the real world. Some props and surfaces will be brought in or recreated for the miniature shoot, so the line between real and animation will be indistinguishable.  In post, where the character is added into each scene, there is also further flexibility to tweak color and tone.

The extra bonus on top: all the behind-the-scenes content from the stop-motion studio, showing teams of artists sculpting, painting, and delicately animating the main character!

Reel

Click here for Vinit Borrison Live Action Reel

See below for examples of Stop Motion

Stop Motion Dept - Air Canada - Snow Globes

Stop Motion Dept - Good Fiend

Stop Motion Dept - MATM Naptime

Head Gear - Lays

Head Gear - Fruit Krisps

Head Gear - Honda Chum

Stop Motion Dept - Van Randomizer

Stop Motion Dept - Cassels Brock - Transformers

Bio

Head Gear Animation has been solving creative riddles for over 20 years. Conceived by partners Steve Angel and Julian Grey, Head Gear offers all kinds of visual delights for clients around the world.

Head Gear’s strength has always been its designer/directors who bring warmth, humour and character to their stories. Located in Toronto Canada, Head Gear also benefits from a huge pool of talented artists, live action directors and production people who contribute to their wonderful brand of storytelling.

Vinit Borrison is an award winning Director of Photography who has worked internationally for over 15 years. Vinit continues to work alongside notable directors and crews who have fostered his extensive experience and expertise in the film industry. His body of work encompasses a variety of genres including Music Videos, Commercials, Documentaries, Television Series, and Feature Films. The rich diversity of this work affirms his versatility as a cinematographer and filmmaker. Vinit has a well-established reputation for leading innovation in camera technology. He is proud to be one of the first in the country to adopt 8K Cameras, drone technology, lightweight gimbals, and virtual reality/augmented reality cameras, including proprietary systems which he created and designed. With every project, Vinit is constantly pushing boundaries with progressive technologies and adopts innovative and creative techniques resulting in groundbreaking cinematography.

Stop Motion Department Inc. is a Toronto animation studio founded by Philip Eddolls and Evan DeRushie, with a singular focus on keeping the rich tradition of frame-by-frame puppet animation alive. They’ve directed commercials for Air Canada, Nikon, and Google, as well as interstitials for the PBS Kids show Let’s Go Luna! Their nuanced character animation for Zacharias Kunuk’s The Shaman’s Apprentice garnered top film festival awards such as Best Canadian Short film at TIFF 2021, and Best Animated Short at the Canadian Screen Awards 2022. Producing everything in-house with a small team of puppet builders, miniature set experts, and animators in their North York workshop, SMD brings a world-class level of stop-motion knowledge to their work, combined with a modern technical approach that keeps the medium progressing forward.

Thank you!