Kong Studio teams up with The Guardian Labs and Mira Showers to present a Brief History of Cold Water Therapy

Animation Director Anita Gill brings beautiful hieroglyphic and pictogram-inspired design to tell the story for client Mira Showers.

Kong Animation Studio, in collaboration with Guardian Labs have created an animation selling through the benefits of cold-water showers for client Mira Showers.

A cold shower can work wonders to help you heal, recover and generally feel good. Potential benefits include increased circulation, reduced inflammation, and battling depression. From the earliest written records to how Hippocrates took a cold dip, ‘A Brief History of Cold-Water Showers’ offers up a bite-sized introduction to the increasingly popular practice.

The film’s brief was for a succinct, fun and informative animation, to be created from script to screen by Kong.

Creative Director Bill Elliott says

“We offered up a menu of amazing artists, including in-house talent, seasoned animation pros and artists only recently on our radar. A tasty smorgasbord of gifted directors for the client to choose from. And they chose Anita Gill’s portfolio.”

Anita’s stunning work tends to focus on the combination of mark-making, texture, pattern and colour. Her traditional animation is filled with cathartic movement, has an abstract slant, but offers strong, clear design and storytelling.

With a fun script from Harriet Gillan, and a light-hearted voiceover from Louise Amos via Squawk Voices, ‘A Brief History of Cold-Water Showers’ adds to Kong’s signature of light-hearted comedic animation with an informative core, and never at the expense of quality animation and design.

Charlie Jones of Guardian Labs said of the experience:

“Kong were dream collaborators on this project, immediately understanding the client’s needs and providing four fantastic narrative options for us to choose from.

Once we locked in our Ancient Egyptian setting, Kong & Anita got to work on the actual animating –  doing so both quickly and effectively, producing a really beautiful, fun and informative film which took a fresh and innovative approach to what could have been a pretty dry subject.”

This is Kong’s first collaboration with Guardian Labs, with their second film already in production.