And breeaaathe: the animation supergroup creating meditation TV for Netflix’s Headspace

In fact, that baton was handed to a supergroup of animation studios and directors, each tasked with creating 20-minute episodes based on a teaching led by Andy. Four studios and eleven animation directors were involved: Strange Beast with Hannah Jacobs and Lara Lee, Magnus Atom and Yuval Haker; Blink Industries with Alex Grigg, Katy Wang and Gabriel de Bruin; Compost Creative with Colin Thornton and Neil Wilson; and Augenblick Studios’ Aaron Augenblick with Devin Clark; all with a team of animators in tow. They all worked with series art director Drew Takahashi, who explains that the project required a shift in perspective for everyone involved. “Many of us have done our share of commercials where every second is there to stimulate or seduce. In this case the subject seemed to demand a different use of the medium,” Drew tells It’s Nice That. Instead, the team “kept old media habits at bay and sought calm,” he says. “We consciously injected space, air to breathe and often used breathing to pace the shots.”

The result is something that could be a new genre for television. It sits somewhere nearby slow TV, experimental music videos and informational films, but it is also none of those things. Its intention is not to draw your eye or add excitement, but to be passive and secondary; something to visually guide the lesson but not detract from the point of the whole thing, to focus on yourself and not the TV.

One of these segments shows a single watercolour line that weaves around a space eventually creating an orange sphere (by Colin and Neil); another shows orbs floating in the air (Hannah and Lara) or abstract shapes orbiting the orange dot “sun” (Katy and Gabriel); while Alex’s, and Magnus and Yuval’s, visually allude to some of the sequences in the more narrative section of the episode, for example, a rippling pond. For most of the animators, the trickiest hurdle was simplifying their work to an unfamiliar degree. “We thought we had delivered some pretty charming options,” Colin recalls, “but the art director gave us a note I remember: ‘the curse of the ego too clever is not right here’.” Harsh, but fair in Colin’s opinion, and so further iterations saw the concept stripped to its barest bones: a simple watercolour line representing a stream of consciousness, “the rise and fall of that line timed to act as a loose breathing indicator,” he adds.

“We were often really having to pull back on certain ideas,” Hannah says of her episode. “It was definitely quite a strange creative process in that respect, as usually, your job is to make something as visually ambitious and entertaining as possible!” This saw the directors take away detail until all that was left was shapes, conveying the exercise “through the animation movement itself – floating orbs, things morphing effortlessly from one to the next in much the same way our thoughts can organically glide from one to another,” she explains. In the same way Andy’s reassuring tones help his listeners, they also aided the creative process. “We found ourselves intuitively responding to Andy’s naturally calm and considered voice and pacing,” Lara adds. For Alex, himself a practised meditator, the process was even more intuitive. “I really just tried to create something that felt the way that I feel when I try to focus on my breathing,” he says.

Given the emotional themes of the episodes, the project invited the directors to think laterally in how to communicate feelings, without being too prescriptive in terms of character design or scenario. “I suppose this means you’re trying to capture something far more abstract,” Hannah says, “a general atmosphere or emotion, rather than a literal interpretation of the voiceover.” For their episode about letting go, Hannah and Lara used mostly rounded natural shapes to appear more friendly, then “broke this rule when it came to communicating something angry or upsetting,” using angular shapes. They also employed colour as a communicator, picking vibrant, “jarring” tones of blue, yellow, or red also to represent anger; overall the palette was flat and devoid of detail, so as not to distract from the lesson, and their transitions aim to have a “natural fluidity, with scenes effortlessly gliding from one to the next”.

Aaron explains how his team went for harmonious and gentle colours in their two episodes, and referenced impressionist and surrealist artists such as Miro, Matisse and Magritte to help achieve “dreamlike” imagery, which can also be spotted in Alex’s film. Aaron also describes avoiding strong cuts and instead opting for “a floating stream of cartoons… a very important zen concept,” while Colin and Neil also aimed to convey a narrative that could “flow and evolve along with the narrative, like how a stream of consciousness might weave and evolve in a daydream”. One of their episodes, How to Get Started, uses a mixed media collage aesthetic to encompass “a wide range of feelings and emotions as well as humour and science” tied together with inky watercolours to soften the style and “help carry the more emotional sequences”.