Start Up with ‘Stitch’: The Making of Motorola’s New Bootanimation

At Motorola, we design our smartphones and smartwatches to not only look and work great, but also feel great to the touch. Whether it’s the choice of a real wood grain or genuine Horween leather backs available across our Moto X line, or the various sizes and watchbands designed to fit all types of wrists on our Moto 360s, we always strive to deliver a user experience that’s uniquely tangible.

So when it came time to develop a new startup animation -- the animated Motorola logo that appears on your display when you turn your phone on -- we approached renowned product designer Peter Crawley, best known for his “Stitched Illustrations,” in which he hand-pierces paper with a pin, and then stitches it with a needle and cotton thread, resulting in pieces of art that you can almost feel just by looking at them. This felt like a perfect match with our innovative design spirit at Motorola.

“I knew from the start that I wanted the finished piece to have a real tactile feel to it -- for the customer to be able to see the texture and natural qualities of the paper and thread,” Crawley explains. “We played a lot with the existing Motorola color palettes, but felt that the blues and yellow used would not only work best with the screens but also really highlight the textures of the natural materials. The paper stock is sourced from a traditional English paper mill and is usually used for watercolor paintings, but it had such a great texture that is acts as a rich canvas for my work, too.”

So how does a primarily visual artist make the jump into digital animation? Check out the video below to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of our new “Stitch” boot-up.

“It was the first time I had worked on an animation of this type, but the animation team was very experienced in this space and did a fantastic job in pulling together the concept and making the final piece exactly what we envisaged,” adds Crawley. “Seeing my work come to life in this way is really rewarding, but knowing it will be in people's hands all over the world is absolutely amazing.”

Look for "Stitch" on your Motorola device soon. For details on when upgrades will be coming to you, please refer to our software upgrade page for the latest and specifics by country, or follow G+ posts of our release announcements.​

Today, it's starting to roll out on the retail 2015 Moto X Style (3rd Gen) in both Brazil and India, and on the retail 2014 Moto X (2nd Gen) in Brazil retail.

Moodle
Hand stitched Illustration: Peter Crawley
Director: Lewis Kyle White
Creative Director: Chris Claire - Motorola
Animator Hands: Cadi Catlow
DOP: Phil Sills
Producer: Juliette S Dalton
Runner: Lou Marcellin
Studio assistant: Ian Stuart
Production: 2diceproductionz
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Making of
Film, Directed, DOP, Produced and Edit: Juliette S Dalton - 2diceproductionz
Making of Music: Dan Truen
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Stills
Juliette S Dalton - 2diceproductionz