DBLG Celebrates Birthday With Cheeky On-Skin Animations

Ever watched a game of tennis over a bare bottom crack? Or seen a naked nipple going for a stroll? 

No? Then you should probably check out Hey Pressto!, a cheeky stop-motion experiment by agency DBLG and animation studio Animade, which uses naked bodies as a literal canvas for some inventive animations.

The five films - Light Bulb, Nipple Walk, Sneeze, Tennis and Party - were created to celebrate DBLG's 10th anniversary, and required the  several different techniques, including 3D printing, physical imprinting on skin, drawn, stop-motion and digital animation, in what the studios claim is a first for the genre.

Each frame was designed and drawn by Animade before being converted into 3D printed stamps by DBLG, who directed and produced the films at Clapham Road Studios, London. The stamps were pressed by hand onto models of all shapes, sizes and ages, photographed one by one and digitally composited to produce the final animations. 

“I’ve been shooting on stop-frame projects for many years. I imagined I'd seen every possible material animated, but I’d never seen a treatment like this. I liked the strange and playful nature of the idea,” says the project's DOP, Malcolm Hadley, who has worked with the likes of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton.  “The shoot was quite unusual (to say the least) and at times felt more like a doctors surgery rather than a studio. We had quite a lot to get through but we worked with a great cast who were open to ideas and patient enough to be manipulated in various ways.”