Adformatie, Eight things that inspire John Mescall

The creative freedom in this project is the cherry on the cake, keeping the spontaneity in every second. The music and visuals came together in a beautiful way bringing Mescall’s words to life in print and in animation.

The film is published on the Adformatie website and in the printed issue. It has been featured on other international and national websites.

“From that moment on it became a team effort", explains the Director, "using up every spare moment to design and animate every aspect of the short film. All designers were given complete freedom to experiment based on the given interview script, which resulted in almost 20 different approaches. So for every chapter we adopted a specific style using either paper animations, 3D animations, pencil animations and a lot more making it a showcase of all our in-house design talent.” 

A guiding colour palet, John Mescall’s voice and music by our Composer create a strong line through all the chapters. 

As the Composer puts it, “Mescall’s voice was a strong inspiration, especially his calmness and laid-back rhythm gave me an instant feeling I wanted to bring across. The music needed a breezy vibe to support the visuals and the voice-over.” 

“In a very early stage I got so excited because the music was hitting the vibe I wanted to bring across, so I called up the Director and we started high five-ing.”

What started as a simple interview between Adformatie and John Mescall, who is the creative director for ‘Dumb ways to die’, accelerated into a printed 8-page section and animated short film about his 8 inspirational sources.

Mescall’s words are brough to life using a voice-over and there is no better person than Mescall himself to record his own spin of thought. His calm, Australian accent becomes a strong inspiration and sets the tone for the rest of the project.