Cel Animation

Our Cel Animation Department has a dedicated team of artists who can create excellent character designs, layouts and animations. They are also fluent in the latest techniques so as to combine cel and 3D animation and to create animations with new and original styles.

John Timms is MarteStudio's cel animation director and lead storyboard artist. He has 15 years of experience making cel animation for commercials for several countries in Latin America and has won Awards at the Festival de Cine de Puerto Rico and the Festival Iberoamericano de Publicidad (Advertising Festival for Spain, Portugal and Latin America) including Best Animation for a Fanta Commercial.

John is regarded as one of Costa Rica's best animators and illustrators and has done character design for such international brands as Coca-Cola, Fanta, Hall's, Bimbo, Panasonic, Quaker, Hi-C among a host of Latin American brands.

He is co creator of a series of animated shorts for Swiss Television for which he co developed the story and created the character designs and storyboards.

For international projects, John usually travels to the client's country during preproduction to interactively create character designs and/or storyboards.

John is also quite knowledgeable in the design and creation of visual FX, which is of great help when deciding on the most appropriate camera angles, motions, and general details that have to be carefully planned, explained and depicted on the storyboards themselves.

MarteStudio's department of cel animation consists of a team of animators the size of which varies depending on the scale of the projects being produced. Cel animation is initially hand drawn, but the rest of the process is done digitally. Six workstations are used for the ink and paint and compositing process. Most of the permanent crew of animators has also received training in 3D animation, which has helped in the creation of projects that combine 2D and 3D techniques.