Fujitsu
Every project starts with a lot of thinking before there is much to show.
For Fujitsu, we were commissioned to develop the full creative concept for a collage led animation, taking the project from the first rough ideas and notebook sketches through to the final 120 second piece.
We always start by getting close to the brief. We read, talk, research, collect references and throw ideas between the two of us. We need to understand the story first, but we also need time to find our own way into it. With Fujitsu, that way in became Formula 1: speed, precision, teamwork and the relationship between human expertise and technology.
Then we start building.
This is probably the most natural way to describe how we work at Gibson Kochanek Studio: piece by piece, collage by collage.
We source images, cut things out, change backgrounds, play with scale, colour, texture and composition. We make something, look at it together, question it and change it. One collage starts suggesting the next. A shape makes us think about another scene. An image gives us an idea for a transition. Slowly, separate frames begin connecting and a visual language starts becoming a story.
We don't have every second of an animation planned before we begin, and we don't want to.
While creating the collages, we have a loose picture of where everything could go, but we leave space for the project to surprise us. At this stage our heads are in still images: finding the right assets, creating compositions and making sure the visual world feels coherent.
Throughout this process, we share the work with the client. Not because everything is finished, but because we want to make sure we are building in the right direction. We listen, discuss and adjust. The client knows their world better than anyone; we know ours. The best projects happen when those two things meet.
Only when the visual language feels right do we move fully into animation.
And our thinking changes again.
Now it is about movement, rhythm, pacing and the voiceover. Ideas we had while making the collages are tested properly for the first time. Some work exactly as imagined. Others change completely. Sometimes a small movement creates a transition we hadn't thought of before and suddenly two separate scenes belong together.
That freedom to keep discovering is a big part of how we work.
For Fujitsu, tens of original collages gradually became one visual system, translating the CASE story and Fujitsu's vision of Autonomous IT through the energy of Formula 1. Human expertise and AI work together like a pit crew: fast, precise, connected and always ready.
The final animation was delivered without a single change or amendment from the client, something they told us was a rarity.
We loved hearing that, of course. But what made us happiest was how we got there.
Behind the final 120 seconds were two people thinking, talking, making, questioning and refining. There was trust from the client, conversations along the way and hundreds of small decisions that nobody watching the finished animation will ever see.
That is what sits behind every project at Gibson Kochanek.
We build it together, piece by piece, until all those separate pieces suddenly feel like they could never have belonged anywhere else.
