Golden Wolf is the latest addition to award-winning design studio ilovedust and despite only having gone it alone in the past year they’ve already racked up some serious clients, from Snoopzilla (we can’t keep up) to Cartoon Network and Major Lazer. We chatted to Co-Founder and Creative Director Ingi Erlingsson ahead of Golden Wolf’s appearance at OFFSET 2014 about his experiences in animation and how Golden Wolf create their vibrant and exciting projects.
So can you give us a quick rundown of how you got involved in graphic design and animation?
So I started off as a teenager doing graffiti, I’ve been doing that for about 20 years. I got into graphic design and web design right before I went to uni, and then when I got to uni I was taught by a guy called John McFaul, who at the time was a really well-known illustrator and creative who was part of the scene in London and he was a big inspiration for me. He was friends with the guys from ilovedust so I did an internship there and then began working for them afterwards. I was there for 7 years and during that time I’d started off doing little bits of animation and then more and then we started a studio that just did animation called Golden Wolf.
A lot of graphic designers seem to have been very precocious in their experimentation with digital design and coding, how did you get involved in that side of design?
I think it goes back to the graffiti thing, I mean graffiti obviously happens out on walls but it’s also very social and what the graffiti scene had back in 2000, 2001, 2003 was a really big online presence. Everyone was on MSN and forums to chat to each other and share information. Eventually, the more we got involved in that the more we started working on things like flyers on Photoshop and integrating the computer into what you were doing outside on walls or on paper. I guess because computers were so integral to what everyone was doing at the time the natural progression was that we started to do more digital design. I mean it wasn’t like today where every 10 year old has a Facebook account, back then being online was such a novelty that we’d all try and use the computer in any way we could.
How did you make the change from working with ilovedust doing illustration projects to working solely on animation and motion graphics?
Before I joined ilovedust I did a six-month work placement for a company in New York called Surround who did some animation and live action. They were a couple of guys who had started on their own and were doing music videos like the first video for The Killers, their first big hit. When I was there I was mainly doing design and then eventually some animation. I was still very focussed on illustration when I started with ilovedust and I stuck to that for a couple of years and then did a few bits of animation because I knew how. Then we took on a project for Pepsi and it was kind of a coincidence in that we were working on an illustration project that they wanted to turn it into a TV ad. They called us up and asked were we capable of animating the ad we’d illustrated and we took the job on and made it up as we went along. After that we started collaborating with other people, other companies and hiring in freelancers but then as time went on we hired more and more people and now there are 11 of us just doing animation.
With your Cartoon Network video for their 20th birthday you worked with a lot of characters that people would recognise and relate to. How did that compare with working on your own, original characters?
It’s very different. I mean in some ways when you’re doing your own stuff your biggest hurdle is…what does it look like? What’s the creative? What are the characters like? Meanwhile when you’re working with other people’s characters there’s already a precedent for what they look like and you have to draw them exactly the way they should be and they can’t act uncharacteristically. But the really cool thing is that when you get all that handed to you, you already know how that character moves and behaves and that really broadens what kind of story you can tell and what you can do with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPL85XWXz_w
Most of your work is really psychedelic and trippy but then, when you look at your portfolio and you have quite serious graphic work like the ad for Hurley. How do you shape your style and how informed is it by the briefs you receive?
The most psychedelic thing we’ve done was the MTV animation, the brief we got was that MTV were doing the five senses and we got given ‘sight’. So we thought, what do you do with sight? We figured we just had to do something crazy…it’s kind of all you can do. What we’ve always done when we get an open brief is ask ‘well what’s the craziest thing we can do without offending anyone?’ With the Hurley Shorts ad, it’s something we’re really proud of, but it wasn’t a time where the client said ‘look, go crazy’. There was a really specific brief and we stuck to it. Meanwhile with MTV they usually give us just a single line or a couple of references and ask us what we’d like to do. Normally we try and do something alien to what we’d do in other briefs and make it a bit mental and I think people react to that a lot better. When you produce something mad and weird they can take what they want from it.
For the tour intro you did for Major Lazer, it was really intense and rich, did you have a very detailed brief for that?
Oh none of that was a brief. We were working directly with the guys in Major Lazer and they were touring the world and only really had time once a week to answer their emails and they basically just said you know we need an intro…what do you want to do? We met with their Creative Director who designs all their covers etc and he explained a bit of the back-story to us and we just came up with what we thought should be the story from then on. I guess we took the opportunity to use an already pre-established story and tell a new version of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6VKApfXzK0
What is the typical profile of someone who works for you?
Everyone is between 25 and 30 pretty much, most of the people here came directly from uni. Many of them have worked here for 6 or 7 years having come straight from university and I guess a lot of what we do is just learn on the job, we don’t have anyone who’s got 20 years experience so everyone is pretty new to the industry and come from a broad range of backgrounds. We’ve got people from Spain, France and I’m from Iceland…we’ve got people from all over.
Do you still hire graduates who can learn and adapt to your style or are you finding you require people with more specialised skills as you grow?
I think it’s a bit of both really. Graduates are great because they have the drive and the hunger that perhaps people that have been in the industry for a good few years haven’t got. But that being said, a lot of the jobs now are so technical that you really need people who know what they’re doing, sometimes more than we do. We’ve been hiring people with more specific experience recently but generally we have tended to hire people straight out of uni.
Who are your closest competitors?
I think we compete with a lot of directors from places like Passion, Nexus and Buck in the US. We’re in that in between place in that many companies would only have 3 or 4 people whereas other, big studios would have close to 100. We’re not the smallest and we’re not the biggest.
Is the size of the organisation is that optimal for you? Would you like to expand?
I think for animation, well certainly for the way we work, we don’t usually have everyone working on the same project at once. There are 11 of us here and we’d often work on ten different projects and it always feels like we’re a couple of people short. I don’t know how much more we’d like to expand but it would be good to have a team for each discipline. We might grow to 20 or 30.
Words: Emily Carson
Feature Image: Ray-ban Clubmaster
Promo for 7 Days of Funk by Snoopzilla
You can check out Golden Wolf’s Vimeo Channel here
