Our team are great! They are all incredibly talented, with a diverse and fascinating range of interests. As well as being one of our animators, Phil is a host of horror podcast Radio Gorepress! You can find Radio Gorepress by searching for it on iTunes, Spotify, or your podcast platform of choice.
Because it’s Halloween, we asked Phil to pick his top five horror movies. The team also created a Halloween playlist, listen here if you have Spotify!
With Spooky Season well and truly upon us, now’s the time to curl up on the sofa, hide behind the cushions and put on a horror film...but what to watch? Well it’s a good thing you asked, because here are five of my favourite horror movies for some inspiration...
Beetlejuice (1988)
Since horror isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I’m gonna kick this list off gently with Tim Burton’s horror-comedy, Beetlejuice. Telling the story of a recently-deceased couple who enlist the aid of self-proclaimed ‘bio-exorcist’ Betelgeuse to get rid of the family that has moved into their house, Beetlejuice straddles that line between spooky and fun perfectly.
The Ring (2002)
The Ring might not make it into everyone’s top 5 list, but this one has a special place in my heart since it’s one of the first films that showed me just how fun the experience of watching horror movies can be. Director Gore Verbinski does a fantastic job transplanting the story from its original Japan to Chicago, and with a creepy Hans Zimmer-scored soundtrack and some excellent prosthetic work by SFX veteran Rick Baker (if you know, you know), it’s no wonder that this film sparked the frenzy of J-horror remakes of the early 2000’s.
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Continuing the theme of Asian horror, A Tale of Two Sisters is based on an old Korean folk tale, and follows the story of two sisters who arrive home from hospital to their father and new stepmother. Tensions rise amongst the family as unexplained goings-on start occurring within the house that threaten to unearth a dark history. As beautiful as it is scary, A Tale of Two Sisters is a haunting fairy tale that will stick with you for a long while afterwards.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
The best satires are often themselves shining examples of the genre they are satirising, and The Cabin in the Woods is no exception. I’d be doing it a disservice in telling you anything about it – trust me, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s best to go in as blind as you can – but suffice to say it’s a genuine haunted-house-rollercoaster of a movie, skewering tropes and cliches from all sorts of horror subgenres.
Bloodborne (2015)
I know this is a game, not a film, but quite frankly this is my list and I can do what I want. Debuting on the PS4, Bloodborne is set in the sprawling Gothic city of Yharnam, a city ravaged by a plague that gradually turns its victims into beasts. Dripping with atmosphere, Bloodborne tells its story in quite an oblique manner (in true FromSoftware style), but once unravelled it imbues everything else in the game with new meaning and propels the game into new heights.
And there you have it! Five spooky horror movies for some Halloween fun. EnjoOoOoOoOyyyy…
It’s a very exciting time at We Are Cognitive and next year promises to hold even more whiteboard animations, surprises, innovations, and great visual storytelling for our clients. We want to thank the We Are Cognitive team and every client we have worked with this year for making 2022 a great adventure. See you in 2023!
Professor Ray Laurence talks about the ways translating his research into explainer videos with Cognitive has dramatically increased the reach of his work and triggered debate among people across the world.
Awareness plays a major role and at We are Cognitive, we are proud to have have used our creativity to make whiteboard animations that explain, draw attention to the problem and share the information with the public!
The University of Manchester’s findings linked microplastics to another big problem, sewage discharges into rivers. Their findings had far reaching implications, what we shared through whiteboard animation.
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The BLT combines our passion for visual thinking, the week’s news and our creative team to create a delicious visual treat for your feed every week!
Talk To The Hand was created by We are Cognitive founder, Andrew Park, the creative force behind the RSA Animates. Our first episode is with Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation and former CEO of the RSA.
In this blog, Andrew reflects on the origins of whiteboard animation, the RSA Animates and the journey that led to the creation of this new series, Talk To The Hand.
While we work with clients to carefully select the ideal voiceover artist for each whiteboard animation, we must confess to having a few favourites!
Is ‘Die Hard’ a Christmas movie? We’ve seen the arguments on either side, but we’re still not sure. We created this whiteboard video to try and answer it once and for all!
We've been wanting to make one of these for quite a while and it gives us the opportunity to go behind the scenes, and explore the creative process of creating the latest RSA whiteboard video.
Read about our Senior Creative Sarah Verrall’s experience of bringing the vision and mission of CIRAD to life in our whiteboard animation for them.
This year the RSA have won in the Webby Awards’ animation category for their RSA Shorts series. To celebrate this achievement, we asked the RSA’s Mairi Ryan and Abi Stephenson about the series and sharing ideas more broadly.
Recently we heard the excellent news that RSA have won a Webby Award, described by the New York Times as as ‘the Internet’s highest honor’.
At Cognitive we’ve gone through the back-catalogue and found some animations that we hope help you to educate and entertain your new students.
Coronavirus has had an impact on every aspect of our lives, in a way unprecedented in modern memory. It’s a complex topic, subjected to frequent change and misinformation.
It’s hard to work on so many whiteboard animations and not develop a few personal favourites. We put some of our team on the spot to get theirs.
Condensing more than 260 years of history into one mural is no mean feat. In this post Cognitive founder and mural artist Andrew Park talks about the experience of creating it and the events he and RSA Historian Anton Howes have held.
To keep our team at the height of their visual thinking and storytelling abilities, we asked them to keep sketchnote diaries. These are an amazing way to practice the highly crafted elements that go into our whiteboard animations.
Often the very first books we encounter are picture books, our first introduction to the power of rich visual language. While our books change, the power of this language doesn’t. Senior Creative Dan Stirrup reflects on this visual language from picture books to explainer films and Whiteboard Animation.
Black Holes might not seem to be visually engaging at the outset. Ultimately there’s not a lot to work with when you think of a hole that swallows light so nothing can be seen. But for Cognitive this is exactly the sort of challenge we love. Hear from Andrew Park about how he and the team visually translated Prof Hawking’s final Black Hole theory of Supertranslations.
Originally published by the RSA in 2015, Andrew Park muses on his creation of the RSAnimates style and the invention of whiteboard animation. ‘When one returns to something there is a tendency to look back over what went before - to assess where you have come from in order to move forward.’
A lot of the time, we use characters to help aid with our storytelling which is why, as an Illustrator, I often study figures in real life.
It is interesting to see how the fundamental tools we use everyday at Cognitive, such as mapping out a story arc or using a metaphor to simplify and explain a complex idea, can be used in the pursuit of mental and spiritual improvement.
In a lot of our Cognitive films, we are required to draw a public figure within the animation, whether it be a celebrity or a company employee. In this blog one of our brilliant illustrators takes us through the steps to creating an uncanny portrait.
Every explainer animation we create is a collaboration between us and our clients. Guided by each client’s essence, goals and message, we create scripted and visual storytelling that is informative, engaging, memorable and relatable. The result is a carefully crafted and bespoke explainer animation.