Argentina: Plenty; The Non-Stop Motion Studio

Did motion house Plenty get inspiration for their latest work – a Mad Hatter’s party-themed short – from the crazy challenges of real life in post-crisis Argentina? Maybe. But David Knight discovers this impressively energetic animation studio has plenty of methodical know-how to go with the creative madness – a combination that can be improved with only one thing… barbecue

In the latest work from Plenty – the Buenos Aires-based arts, animation and motion studio – one of literature’s most famous scenes is given a fresh retelling. It’s the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice In Wonderland, and in Plenty’s version – an animated short called We Need To Talk About Alice – a unusually worldly Alice, sporting discreet tattoos, is getting acquainted with the Hatter et al in a unusually tropical and increasingly surreal setting.

We Need To Talk About Alice contains 3D character animation that could grace a Hollywood movie, but then introduces more leftfield quirkiness than anything out of Pixar or Dreamworks. As the velvet-voiced narrator starts to digress from reading Lewis Carroll’s 150-year-old classic, new animation styles encroach upon the pristine CGI, offering extra dimensions of creativity and imagination.

For this five-year-old studio that’s produced work for a wide range of local and global clients – including Nike, Chevrolet, Fox and MTV – their take on Alice is the next big step. The film was commissioned by New Zealand agency String Theory to promote Good Books, the online bookseller whose profits go to charity. (Previous spots in the series include collective Buck’s film Metamorphosis, inspired by Hunter S Thompson.) The budget was small, but the brief was open. For Plenty, it was an opportunity to extend the range of their already-impressive expertise.

“String Theory and Good Books thought it would be interesting to take this very English story to a South American studio, to get a completely new look,” says Mariano Farias, creative director and co-founder of Plenty. “Our first goal was to finish the project, but the second goal was to learn how to do it.”

His fellow CD and co-founder Pablo Alfieri adds that the open brief, unusual even in charity-based advertising, was “like a blank piece of paper… really scary”. They were determined to reach Hollywood standards of 3D animation – and do the job themselves. “We wanted the knowledge to stay in-house at Plenty, so if companies ask for something like this, we don’t have to hire freelancers all the time.”

As a result, We Need To Talk About Alice has taken a painstaking two years to complete – mostly during downtime from other, bill-paying projects. The studio was given nothing but support from the agency for their ideas – except for when it came to Alice’s attributes. “We wanted to make her more sexy, but the agency said ‘That’s too much!’” reveals Farias.

A business built on barbecue

Alfieri, Farias and their executive producer Inés Palmas are talking to shots in London, just after the premiere of their …Alice film organised by their UK rep, Jelly London. It’s a landmark moment for Plenty, but also somehow typical of the studio’s impressive forward momentum.

Plenty has grown steadily in the past five years on a combination of energy, dedication and an outward-looking philosophy that has seen them working with clients from USA to China. They are a motion design company studio that has expanded to include all styles of animation, as well as non-motion art and illustration. They have been particularly successful in the area of TV branding and motion graphics, building a client base in the US and all over Europe for their skilful work, winning numerous awards.

HBO, Fox, AXN, National Geographic, Nickelodeon, MTV, Canal+ and the Discovery Channel have all given work to Plenty – often repeatedly. That has been the studio’s core business, while their advertising portfolio has been building steadily, including ads for Doritos, Vodafone and Volkswagen (unfortunately, their award-winning Think Blue ad for DDB Mexico extols VW’s now-discredited diesel emission rates). One of their most recent spots is for British online printing and design company MOO, and they have also completed a charming stop-motion animated ad for Oreos in Argentina.

They have already come a long way since 2010, when Alfieri and Farias started working together. Both had several years’ experience in their respective fields of animation and art direction when they joined forces to work on a campaign for Schweppes. “Mariano had his own projects, I had my own projects, and we started to share this little apartment we used as an office,” Alfieri recalls. “It was very small – but the important thing was it had a barbacoa!”

And so Plenty was born, and the pair soon recruited producer Palmas and lead animator Hernan Estevez – both now partners in the studio with the founders. Then came their breakthrough campaign, commissioned by MTV to commemorate the bicentenary of the independence of five South American countries, including Argentina – a battle in 3D between abstract shapes, representing the forces of liberation and reaction, beautifully art directed by Alfieri and animation directed by Farias.

Since then they have produced various standout examples of the art of TV branding and promos, winning a stream of awards. One of their first commissions, from regular client AXN Latin America, graphically emphasised the psychological themes of US TV show Criminal Minds, showing a young man’s face (eventually revealed to be CGI) filling up with scrawled messages. Shortly afterwards in 2011, Plenty’s first entire TV channel branding, for Nat Geo Adventure, became the moment they moved from the comfort zone of 3D animation to stop-motion and photo animation. The branding highlighted the analogue, human drama of the backpacking experience.

Next came an award-winning series of idents for Nickelodeon channel NICK that plays like claymation on steroids: malleable orange clay transforms into various characters in a blink of an eye before splattering all over the screen. It’s all too fast and well-designed to be real claymation, but it certainly has the personality of something handmade. In fact, traditional animation – if not stop-motion – was a part of the creative process.

“We don’t like to think about the limits of technology and software,” says Farias. “For the NICK idents we started to think about the technical problems, and decided that before we went to 3D we should draw each frame in 2D. That’s what we did: I made it frame by frame and then the 3D animator took it.”

“What we want to do, is make things where you feel the human touch. That’s really important for us,” says Alfieri. “It’s not always possible, but when we can, we try to do it.” It’s this feel, coupled with the vivacity of their work, that creates the perceptible Plenty style.

Making a dollar out of a crisis

It has always been a priority for the studio to get their work noticed outside Argentina, according to Palmas, because the local market was essentially too small to allow the studio to grow. The internet has made that task relatively straightforward. “People from Europe and America don’t really care where you’re located, only if you have a good portfolio. And we had a good portfolio.”

Everything from the time difference – which makes it easy to work in both Europe and America – to the strong influence of both European and North American culture in Argentina (and in Buenos Aires in particular) has also worked in their favour. “We also had this fresh energy,” says Palmas. “We would try different things, so if they asked for two ideas we would come up with four.”

That energy, drive and can-do attitude stems from living in the vibrant Argentinian capital – but also from being part of a generation that has experienced huge national crises, including Argentina’s financial meltdown in 2000, when the savings of millions were wiped out. “We’re more capable of fixing a lot of problems, because we’ve had to fix everything,” says Farias.

“We lived through the crisis, and after that I think our minds changed in a good way,” adds Alfieri. “We have a really good culture, in terms of music and art, incredible animation studios, design studios that are really good. One of the things that really helped the animation market was that all the TV channels have a branch in Argentina, and the creativity started to grow.”

He adds that Argentina’s first proper 3D animated movie, Metegol, made a couple of years ago, also helped a lot. “The three best animators from Metegol worked on the Good Books project.”

The advertising market in Argentina is also “one of the best of the region” but usually that means being creative with small budgets. Alfieri highlights ad agencies Madre and Santo as the best agencies in Buenos Aires right now, achieving excellent campaigns with low budgets. Plenty’s new stop-motion Oreo ad probably falls into that category – an online ad encouraging followers to post their own videos. For TV, as with a lot of US brands, Oreo prefers to reformat their American ads for the Argentinian market.

Hence the importance of We Need To Talk About Alice… For Plenty it represents a calling card into a new level of work – almost a new division of the company. “We have done a lot of brandings, for HBO, Fox and others – that’s one face of Plenty.” says Farias. “Here [in the UK] we want to focus on the advertising market.”

“We are really good at doing TV branding and it’s our speciality at the moment,” echoes Alfieri. “We have a really good team. But we want to approach the commercial market and I think that is totally different. So we are learning and trying to focus our minds there, but without losing the other part of it.”