Creatography Spotlight: Evan Hilton, Self-Taught Animator

BreakingModern — Evan Hilton, a self-taught stop-motion animator is more than just a person posting videos on Vine. He’s done work for Coca-Cola, Mashable and the Food Network, and he’s won awards at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Jozi Film Festival. Hilton is constantly finding inspiration from ordinary places like parks and has a knack for taking everyday objects and creating illusions with them. He’s an innovator looking to create content that makes admirers of his work stop and think about what he just did. If you like color, you should definitely check out his work on his personal website and social media outlets.

We caught up with Hilton to hear about how he got started, what his role has been like in Creatography with HTC and what he’s working on now. Check out what Evan Hilton (EH) has to say in the Q&A below.

Evan Hilton creatography photo 1

BreakingModern: If you had a tagline for yourself what would that be?

Evan Hilton: I am a six-second storyteller.

BMod: What inspired you to teach yourself to be a stop-motion animator?

EH: I was getting bored with just creating, painting and drawing. When I went on the Vine app for the first time, I saw all these people creating animation, and I instantly wanted to do the same thing. The minute I made my first six-second animation, I was hooked.

BMod: What do you think is the best project you’ve created so far?

EH: The best thing I’ve done so far would probably be the animation where I created a cartoon character — it was the first cartoon character I ever created on my own with no inspiration from anyone. It was purely my idea. The animation clip shows me drawing the character. It’s probably my proudest moment in animation because it’s me completing and creating something on my own.

Evan Hilton Creatography photo 2

BMod: What are you working on now? Would you like to share it with BreakingModern readers?

EH: I’m currently working on a variety of ideas. More than likely my future projects will involve drawing animations. That’s the most I can really share at the moment. There’s going to be more hand-drawn stuff, which I kinda veered away from for a while. I was busy doing animation that involved physical objects — although I did produce a Vine clip for HTC using hand-drawn animation. I plan on doing a lot more of that kind of stuff in the future.

Evan Hilton Creatography photo 3

BMod: You have found inspiration in many places. What’s the most-interesting and strangest place you found one of your best ideas?

EH: It’s pretty funny because most of the places I get my inspiration come from ordinary places — like the parks that are shown in my HTC video. There’s one animation I made where I searched parks in Jacksonville, Fla. and came across this one where the park consisted of just one giant tree. I think the tree was 250 years old, so it was really huge. I went with my friends and did a short little animation showing the whole tree. I also did a series of clips where I used different patterns and colors to show movement across an entire sheet of paper. And I think I got a lot of that inspiration during a particular summer in New York seeing a lot of street art. It kind of gives you the idea to try to use that colorful aspect and do some cool design stuff in animation form.

Video: Creatography | Evan Hilton: Six-Second Storyteller

BMod: What are some common themes/ideas you like to showcase in your work?

EH: I like to showcase color. In a lot of my animation work, there are typically a lot of colors. I also like to showcase ordinary objects and try to transform them into something really creative. For example, I based one animation on a wrench I found in my tool bag. I like to do things like that. I grabbed a little metal ball (like a diff ball), and I made the wrench look like it was being zapped. The ball exploded into tiny pieces of metal in the clip even though it was just an illusion. I think it’s fun to do things like that. The fun thing about using ordinary objects is that they are all around you. That’s where I get a lot of my ideas. I also like to do cartoon-character animation every once in a while because I obviously love to draw. But it also pleases all my followers online on Vine and various social media platforms. People absolutely love them so it’s fun to throw them out there every once in a while.

Evan Hilton Creatography photo 4

BMod: If there’s one message you can share with your audience, what would it be?

EH: I would say create content that you are passionate about but also content that would make people stop and think. There’s a lot of content out there that exists solely to get “likes.” I don’t want to say that kind of stuff is stupid, but people should focus on creating content that they care about.

For BMod, I’m Alicia Chinatomby.

Image credits: Evan Hilton

Disclaimer: HTC and aNewDomain Media co-produce this site, and it’s editors and writers are paid accordingly.

Alicia Chinatomby

Author: Alicia Chinatomby

Based in New York City, Alicia Chinatomby covers trends and personalities for BreakingModern. Follow her at @AliciaC_7 on Twitter.

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