Averbode publishing – Imagination

‘Subscribe to your child’s imagination’

Mutant invited us to design and animate a new campaign film for Uitgeverij Averbode, to promote their line of educational subscription magazines during the easter and summer holidays of 2022.

Uitgeverij Averbode is a Belgian publisher with over a century (🤯) of experience in children’s books and magazines. Publications like Zonnestraal and Doremi have been going strong for decades in providing fun educational content to children in an age-range of toddlers to early teens.

To balance out kids’ passivity watching endless YouTube playlists and playing addictive online games, Averbode reaches out with its learning and activity books. These publications are designed to stimulate children’s imagination.
Rather than having them absorb one-way digital information, they can interact with something physical and playfully complete the missing pieces themselves (often literally through connect-the-dots games, coloring plates and other types of puzzles).  The core idea for parents is that subscribing to magazines like these is to subscribe to your child’s evolving imagination.

The creatives at Mutant developed scenarios of playful imaginary worlds around the kind of games and exercises that could be found in a Doremini magazine. A color-by-numbers picture of an ostrich Mona Lisa comes to life as a floating world in which ice-skating ostriches paint the canvas. Glossy digital apps and games may appear more sophisticated than a color-by-numbers picture, but as an overall experience the former often remain restricted to the screen’s boundaries. The latter, however, aim to provide a primal spark from which entire dream worlds could emerge. The child can choose (and should be encouraged) to paint outside the lines.

2022
Campaign film
for Cinema and social media distribution
0m45s
Dutch/French

Client: Uitgeverij Averbode
Agency: Mutant
2D+3D design: Liesbeth Eeckman, Joel Rabijns
Creative direction, 3D design + modelling, animation: Joel Rabijns
Concept, creative direction: Roxane Schneider, Jonathan d’Oultremont
Project management: Shi Qi Ji
Audio: Klankwerk