Why Make Images Move? Karl Doran Flow Creative- Pickle Chats
We were delighted to sit down and (virtually) chat with the wonderful Karl Doran of Flow Creative. ‘A multi-award winning brand communications agency’, Flow has made waves within the design community for their emotive, creative and always professional work.
Manchester based and proud, Karl is travelling down to Brum this June to talk at Birmingham Design Festival, tickets can be found here.
Without further ado…
1. If you just met an alien who had NO concept of who you are at Flow Creative, how would you describe to them what it is you do?
If I met an alien, I’d have so many questions… I’m not sure we would get onto Flow.
But assuming we’d done all the small talk. We’ve just turned 5 years old last year and have been thinking about who we are. We started off as a purely motion graphics animation studio and that was my background. But we quickly started being asked to do campaign work and brand projects so it’s changed a little bit over the years.
What you always get told to do is niche down on a particular sector or service. I was always put off the idea, I didn't want to be too restrictive because I would get bored and the team would get bored. We looked at our portfolio and the work we had done before and WHO we had done our best work for and we realised it was charities, public sector and arts and cultural organisations. What linked them together was that they were about, more than just making profit, they wanted to make the world a better place.
“What you always get told to do is niche down on a particular sector or service. I was always put off the idea, I didn’t want to be too restrictive because I would get bored and the team would get bored.”
2. Describe the moments when you find you get into the best ‘flow’ within your work/role?
Good question! This is really interesting as when I first started Flow I had just finished reading the book on the ‘Flow state of mind’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I was really fascinated by that idea and the study Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did where he asked people to note down when they felt happiest in the day.
The subjects always reported that they were the happiest when they were engaged in a task that was challenging enough that it kept them engaged but not too challenging that they felt stressed. That’s when you achieve that almost meditative state where you lose awareness of time passing, when you’re completely absorbed in what you’re doing. It can be playing a sport, running, or animating a shot. My role now is split between running the business and overseeing the creative output so I don’t get much ‘flow’ these days. I’ve got a really good studio manager that helps manage the projects and the team side of it, and the whole team are really good at what they do. Half my time is in the busy studio, music on, lots of chatting and it's quite lively, and the other I half shut myself away and put a classical playlist on and get into a bit of a zone of thinking and writing stuff.
3. We loved the work you did for Children in Need and it made massive waves within the design community. Tell us more about how the opportunity came around?
Thanks! I met with James Cross, one of the creative directors at BBC Creative at a networking event called Motion North. James was doing a talk about their World Cup tapestry campaign, which was mind blowingly bonkers. I just went up after and said I loved that project and we had a bit of a chat and exchanged details. Soon after, they asked us to go in and show the BBC Creative team some of our work, which led to us working with them on a CBBC trail, and then they got in touch a bit later about the Children in Need campaign.
It’s one of my all time fave Flow projects, a beautifully crafted film for a great cause. It was a big, high profile project, and a lot of work so it was amazing for a studio the size of ours at the time. And it was a risk for them to go with a small animation studio with such a big campaign. Normally projects on that scale would go to Nexus, Passion Pictures, BlinkInk or another of the big animation studios in London, so a big win and great to see it go to a Manchester studio.The story was written by the children's author and illustrator Tom Percival, and the visual style is his signature look. He created about half of the artwork for the animation, and we made the rest in his style. We worked with BBC Creative to map the visuals out, then storyboarded it and animated it all. The composer Alexander Baronivski composed a bespoke soundtrack, and it was finished off with a great voiceover by the comedian Sara Pascoe.
4. Talking about working with charities and nonprofits, how do you find working with smaller companies who potentially have smaller budgets?
It can be a challenge. We have worked with a few charities who don’t have a huge budget but have a really interesting story to tell and it's a really good cause. So we have on occasion taken a bit of a hit with those projects and just decided to over deliver for them because we believe in what they’re doing and want to help them.
A good example is a charity called Syria Relief, who we’ve worked with for the last two years. The first time we worked with them in 2020 they wanted to make a film to mark the 10 year anniversary of the conflict in Syria. We did it from the point of view of a 10 year old boy who had grown up knowing nothing but war. They only had a small budget and we probably spent, in studio time, double what we should have on it. But sometimes you make that decision, you know you’re going to spend too much time on it but it’s an opportunity to make a great film and do some good. These projects can often make a really nice portfolio piece too.
“Animation is an incredibly powerful tool for explaining complex things and making an emotional connection with your audience.”
5. You’ve articulated some difficult concepts with Flow. Why do you think moving images is the best tool to create impact when dealing with difficult topics?
Animation is an incredibly powerful tool for explaining complex things and making an emotional connection with your audience. I’m obviously going to be a bit biassed as it’s what we do but I think you can do more with it than you can with film. You can create worlds, there's no limit to what you can do. It used to be the case in conversation with clients, less so these days thankfully, they’d say ‘We’ve gone down a live action route instead because we just wanted to get an emotional side across and we thought film would do that better’.
The idea that you can't tell stories emotionally with animation is ludicrous. And also depending on the size of the production and what is involved it's often a cheaper alternative than film. Everything is controllable and you can design everything to look a certain way. It’s the intersection between several discipline; graphics design, animation, music, film, illustration and all those elements come together to form a really good piece of motion design work.
Mental Health Awareness Week Campaign
6. You’re talking at BDF in June, tell us more about that!
I’ve been to Birmingham a few times and really liked the vibe of the place. My talk is 4pm on Saturday afternoon but I’m coming for the whole festival so I'm looking forward to seeing some great talks, and meeting some new people. The whole Flow team is going for a couple of days so that will be a nice little team trip too.
I’m going to be talking about the work we do at Flow and how that’s changed over the years, from purely motion design to focusing on behaviour change campaigns. And I’m going to revealing our new manifesto, and explaining why we’ve decided to just do good work for the good of the world.
You can book onto Karls talk for free here.
7. Thinking towards the future, what's a project you would LOVE to land in your inbox?
There’s a few clients that everybody in motion design wants to work with like; Nike, Google, Apple, but for me I’d love to get a big WWF campaign, the wildlife guys not the Wrestlers… Or people like Macmillan, Cancer Research, a big charity campaign that we can make a real difference with. But also I love arts and culture work as well and I’d love to do a big campaign with the Tate gallery, the New Yorker magazine, or the London Philharmonic Orchestra, someone like that would be ace!
Quick Fire
Cardigans or Jumpers- I LOVE BOTH- that’s so tough. But because all three of us are in jumpers I’ll say jumpers but I do love a cardigan.
Pickle or No Pickle- All the pickles, all the time! The gherkin is the best bit in a burger. I’ll take other people's gherkins and put them in mine.
Pencil or Digital- Pencil for me. I’m an analog guy. I’ve always got notebooks. But we couldn't get much done if we all worked that way at Flow.
Greggs or Boot’s meal deal- I’m gonna go Greggs… I don't like the idea of factory made sandwiches. I got the Morrisons meal deal for years and it would always be the same kind of thing. No soul goes into them. I do like a pasty but it does give me instant heartburn.
Early Bird or Night Owl- I’ve totally shifted, I used to be a night owl but now I’m an early bird since having kids.
Potatoes or Bread- Potatoes every time, I love potatoes.
Animated film recommendations- Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir are great but challenging. I also love loads I’ve watched with the kids - the Toy Story films, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, The Willoughbys, Missing Link, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Bad Guys, Into the Spiderverse, there’s too many to choose!
Thank you so much Karl! We will see you at BDF and can’t wait to keep up to date with all Flow’s wonderful work.