Never Sit Still shakes up self-promotion with an animated anti-showreel

When it comes to the animation industry, showreels are like business cards. These tightly edited videos showcase the best of what a studio is capable of to win over potential clients and are an excellent way of visualising where their investment could take them.

They're not perfect, though. While showreels are excellent at demonstrating impressive projects, they're also quite static. As soon as the edit is locked, a showreel is trapped in that moment. When a studio moves on to its next project, the whole video needs to be re-edited if it wants to showcase that work.

This was the challenge faced by Never Sit Still. Having tinkered with their showreel to the point of frustration over the years, the animation studio decided it was time to rethink their approach. Their solution? A shamelessly anti-showreel that reimagines how to showcase its offerings in a new way. Check it out below:

"With so much content in the market, we feel they often fail to stand out and quickly become outdated," the studio says of conventional showreels. "In addition, clients can often find our process foreign or complicated, or our previous work might not be the perfect reference for the brief.

"To counter this, we created an 'Anti-Showreel', a video to replace the traditional showreel and capture our animation process, ethos, and work ethic."

Created in-house by the Never Sit Still crew, the video We Never Sit Still is an exciting and engaging reel that's specially designed and animated from scratch. Touching on the studio's many strengths and disciplines, it's an easily understandable showcase that is so effective it's surprising it's never been done before.

"I'm always excited to have the opportunity to work on a project with the team for no client but ourselves," says Never Sit Still creative director Zoe Crocker. "It's super rare and doesn't come up very often — I think the last time we really did this was in 2019! With a much bigger team than before, I was definitely nervous about wrangling it."

She adds: "The process ended up being super collaborative, with the final piece showcasing the team's talent across so many areas of animation: cel, 2D, 3D, character, type. Even a functional zoetrope of a horse run-cycle (mind-blown emoji).

"This video allowed us to showcase tried and tested animation techniques that the studio has become known for whilst also giving opportunities to test new and exciting methods. The final result is uniquely NSS."