Animation Ch 11: The MTV Laboratory

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Where corporate identities became unexpected creative playgrounds and shelved projects found unexpected freedom

The Evolving Animal Kingdom

My first independent project at MTV perfectly encapsulates the beautiful absurdity of early career animation work. The yellow parasaurolophus leaping from purple rocks was part of "Next Big Thing"—a show that got cancelled before my animation ever aired.

Surprisingly, I didn't mourn this shelving. The full animation featured a bizarre evolutionary chain: frog emerging from ant, porcupine from frog, kangaroo from porcupine, hippo from kangaroo, and finally, dinosaur from hippo. The yellow-against-teal color scheme gave the whole sequence a surreal, dream-like quality that I secretly loved.

This taught me something unexpected: Sometimes animation finds greater freedom when released from its intended purpose. Without the pressure of broadcast judgment, this evolutionary oddity became pure creative expression rather than corporate content.

Exclusive Music, Exclusive Animation

The snowboarder in neon represented my foray into MTV's "exclusive music" promotions. Against a vibrant orange background, this character riding a hot pink board embodied the network's approach to music discovery—a figurative "catching the wave" of new sound.

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The original concept had this character jumping over abstract objects while carrying a baby (representing new music). The finished animation maintained the core idea while simplifying the visual metaphor. Working with Pramod, who somehow made a 10-second tune remarkably catchy, this project taught me that animation for music channels exists in the sweet spot between literal and abstract representation.

Another version featured a character fishing along a lake, literally "catching" new music. Both concepts emerged from the same brief but took different visual approaches to the idea of discovery—proving that even straightforward corporate assignments can yield multiple creative interpretations.

Halloween Horrors and Abstract Nightmares

The MTV Halloween ident—a psychedelic nightmare of yellow creatures with bulging eyes against electric pink backgrounds—represented the perfect marriage between corporate needs and creative experimentation.

The Halloween theme provided built-in permission to get weird. The brief essentially boiled down to "make it scary, make it MTV"—parameters broad enough to allow for genuine creative exploration. Using Adobe After Effects to animate these illustrated monsters, I discovered that sometimes the most straightforward assignments ("make something spooky") offer the greatest creative freedom.

indiecator from shashrvaCAI on Vimeo.
This is one of the 'dones' at MTV,  just illustrations and AE animations.  

This project, categorized as one of the "dones" at MTV, showed me how illustration and motion could work together to create something distinctly more unsettling than either medium could achieve alone.

MTV Astro ident

The concept featured an astronaut drinking in space, only to get sucked out into the vacuum after breaking the glass of his suit—a darkly comic take on space exploration that was evidently too contemplative for MTV's frenetic pacing. The dreamy sequence of the astronaut drifting through cosmic emptiness, surrounded by those red orbital shapes against the starry backdrop, perfectly captured the sense of something vast and unknowable.

MTV astro ident from shashrvaCAI on Vimeo.

Despite this criticism, this project remains one of my favorites from that period. The languid pacing, the cosmic imagery, the existential humor—all elements that ran counter to MTV's typically energetic style but felt true to my own creative instincts.

I left with fingers crossed, hoping viewers would eventually see this ident. This experience taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my MTV period: True creative satisfaction comes from making work that resonates with your own aesthetic values, regardless of its commercial fate.

The MTV Education

Looking back at these projects, I see more than just corporate assignments. These animations became a laboratory for developing technical skills, visual style, and creative problem-solving approaches that would define my later work.

Song of the day from shashrvaCAI on Vimeo

MTV offered something invaluable: a playground with boundaries. Each project came with parameters (demographic targets, brand alignments, runtime limitations) that initially seemed restrictive but actually provided creative structure. Working within these constraints taught me to find the sweet spot between client needs and creative expression—a balancing act that defines commercial animation.

The evolutionary dinosaur never found its audience. The snowboarder jumped for music that few may remember. The Halloween creatures scared viewers for only a season. The cosmic astronaut may have been deemed too contemplative for MTV's pace. Yet collectively, these projects formed a crucial chapter in my animation journey.

They taught me that animation exists beyond its intended purpose—that each project, whether aired or shelved, successful or rejected, becomes part of the animator's evolving visual vocabulary. These corporate experiments, with their bright colors and bizarre concepts, weren't just work for hire but essential steps toward finding my own animation voice.

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