Humouring the Fates believes in animation’s ability to powerfully design and drive characters. Whether it’s a feature length film, a TV series, a commercial campaign, a web-based clip, or just a little pre-visualization, we help our clients develop the strongest, character driven material for their communications.
We love to push the boundaries of 2D, 2.5D, or 3D animation and we look forward to doing it for you.
Founded in 1995, Humouring the Fates is a full service animation studio specializing in hand drawn animation. With a dedicated crew of directors, animators and writers, HTF has made it a mission to invent unique animation techniques and bold creative visions.
Did you hear about the Halo Anime?
Wouldja’ like to watch a little of an animated episode we made here at Humoring the Fates with the supa’ wicked awesome cast from Rooster Teeth?
<<– Just click that image.
Do keep this off youtube and other video sites please.
We’d like to thank Will, Adam, Judd, and all the rest at FoD for seeing the humour in John Oates reuniting with his mustache. Here is our little teaser that got released a short while ago, for the show J-Stache:
Yes, that is John Oates as John Oates. Dave Attell is quite the dirty voice of an even dirtier mustache. John may have crafted countless chart topping hits, but his true calling is to star in an animated show were he embraces his former iconic self… for better or worse.
We went with a more retro 80’s cartoon look (read as poorly drawn) with the animation on this one, and purposefully let the director, Jesse Norton, draw most of the animation on this. He grew a handle bar mustache and went on a bender of cheap blended scotch, Clint cigars, elk jerky, and reruns of the 1988 season of Geraldo’s talk show. This was the result.
We had fun with the creative department at AKQA on this spot which is pretty straightforwardly put as: “A woman’s kickboxing practice jumps into cosmic mode as she rescues the planet from impending doom.”
or in ad speak:
“The Nike Women campaign Be Transformed is specifically targeting young women in the Asia-Pacific region. It encourages personal transformation with confidence and strength through sports, activities and training programs. It features personal stories form athletes in that region: Sonia Kong (beach volleyball) and Flora Hon (hip hop dance) from Hong Kong, Mel Lozano (ultimate Frisbee) from the Philippines and Hannah Lo (kick-boxing) from Malaysia, among others.” Basically, we just had a blast making this 2D cel animation commercial from script to screen. It’s made in a sort of modern, hyper anime style and all the effects are hand drawn. The music for this animated commercial wasn’t used in the final and was a track from our house band Roppongi’s Ace. So don’t fret if you’re wishing that track was unused, it’s still a virgin ready to placed into your animated commercial whenever you’re ready.
Here is the Nike:Punching Bag spot (not final sound):
Ricky Engelberg, Nike’s digital director for Asia Pacific, sums up the theme of these spots real nice: “The ‘be transformed’ initiative celebrates the revolution across all aspects of women’s lives. Nike aims to inspire them to take control of their own personal development and understand the value in training.”
The campaign runs exclusively in the Asia Pacific region across cinema, TV, digital (mobile and website), print, out-of-home and in-store. It includes a 110-metre long building wrap of Beijing’s International Plaza, one of the largest department stores in the city. (check out our Print & Design section to see that work and the 2 story sculpture of the punching bag monster!)
This campaign was designed to challenge women to understand the value of training and to rally around a manifesto to become stronger and more confident. We’re very happy that Nike and AKQA chose the medium of animation to execute this creative vision… and even happier that we got to build the animation for them.
A new(er) episode of Joe is Japanesethat now has Japanese & English subtitles and a little more sound design. A new version is coming soon with some fixes to the animation mistakes.
Regardless, we’re hoping you like this one as much as we do. It is guaranteed to teach you one new Japanese word. Oh and yes, in real life the Island Masta is almost as much of an idiot as he appears in this episode. Almost. Quicktime after the jump.
In case you missed these up top, our montage reels if you please:
Here at Humoring the Fates (yes, we spelled it wrong there for the search engines… the studios are spelled old world style: Humouring the Fates) we use a lot of different techniques to craft animation. We think modern 2D cel animation has suffered a lot in the digital age. Software has allowed animators to rely more on digital trickery in favor of the hard work of drawing frame after frame after frame to make something move. Our animators are broken like wild mustangs and taught ancient eastern Zen practices to sit for days on end to finish all the insane work required to animate your project. Our animators harness their raw artistry and passion into each 1/24th of a second of screen time.
Most of our styles are built upon hand made drawings, hand painted backgrounds, and hand made… well everything. Even when we make animation in 3D we hand paint all the textures to exist in 3D space… we like our animation to be organic.
Have a look by clicking on that chap there there——>
In our pursuit of creating motion were there was none before, often we are forced by benevolent hands to slow down and simply produce one static image. A cosmic sign to slow down and enjoy the motionless. A self reflective moment to feel each breath of the pencil’s graphite across the fine tooth of the page. One still moment forever frozen in iconic imagery to remind us that an animator’s life is fleeting.
Typically we ignore all that esoteric bullhonky and craft single images that capture motion despite their stillness… because deep down we are animators. Our lives are centered around making it move.
This is the animated music video we made with the boys from the Eastern Conference Champions. By far the most interesting song we’ve ever made an video for… We used an new, untested (until this production) rotoscope animation process on this video. The actual techniques we used are a bit of a secret, but we will say we did use a ouija board to channel a rather hyperactive spirit from 1985 that claimed to supply the cocaine to the animation crew during production of A-Ha’srotoscoped video. This paranormal entity’s tweaked advice, was particularly useless. So we just kinda winged it…
Also, note the psychopaths’ line dance in the video. If you learn this dance before you hit an ECC concert, you can join all the other people on the dance floor in a post-modern hipster mating ritual that always ends in heaping handfuls of ass.
We’d like to thank Will, Adam, Judd, and all the rest at 
In case you missed these up top, our montage reels if you please:
