When we started Cut the Mustard a year and a half ago, we weren't really sure what we were getting into. All the research in the world could never prepare us for some things (like a worldwide pandemic!), but one thing we never really talk about publicly is that we can't / don't show every project.
It's an interesting dynamic to have for sure - at heart we'd love to share all the work we do, but sometimes it doesn't always work out that way. There's a few reasons for this, and just for fun we'll go over four examples of projects we've never shown and the reasons why.
01 - Rights:
Sometimes we don't always have permission to share the work we do publicly. In some cases, we have some really fantastic work we're allowed to talk about but can't showcase - one examples is some really fun adverts we made for Santander for their Ant and Dec advertising campaign. Sometimes we're not allowed to talk about it either, like [REDACTED].
02 - NDA:
We've got quite a handful of projects completed but under NDA. Any professional animator knows the feeling of being unable to share work or update a showreel because they're waiting for a film to be released. We've got some coming really soon, including some explainer videos, short films, adverts and music videos in the pipeline.
03 - Pitches:
Between client work and running the day-to-day business side of things, our time is often spent pitching - it can be a long process, with often little reward, but we've bagged some of our most exciting work from pitching, be that in person, or with a pitch document. Speaking of, the creative work that goes into pitch docs is often a monumental task in it's own, but we always go above and beyond to sell our vision in the most creative way possible. Three recent examples of jobs we've lost out on are two local commissions funded by the council, and one with the BBC. While we didn't get the job for any, there's always some fun art left behind to share.
04 - Ownership:
The final reason we don't show work is sometimes we don't have ownership over creating the project. Slightly different from the topic of rights, it most often comes down to when we worked collaboratively with other studios, or were a directly contracted by another studio. In those cases, we helped make the film, but didn't make it ourselves (regardless of how much of the film we actually did create). A few examples of this are compositing work we've done (like a recent short for London Film School), or a few explainers and shorts we did before Cut the Mustard existed, so even though we all worked on them, we can't show them here.
That's the main four reasons. Often we don't share things under 10 seconds, or anything commissioned for a small budget, as it often doesn't reflect the standards we're looking to hit in our work. Once we had a project be cancelled mid-way through production, though that is unlikely to happen much ever again. Overall we've learned a lot about the industry and it's quirks, and part of that comes in the work we can and can't show, and how it shapes us going forward.
I hope you look forward to the currently under-NDA work to arrive, and in the meantime, I've attached some jumbled screenshots from some of these projects mentioned. Have fun guessing which is which!
Liam