“Modern Love”, the long-running New York Times essay series, has been a wonderful showcase of animation and illustration. In fact one of last year’s videos took home a Gold Cube in animation at the ADC 94th Annual Awards last spring.

The latest “Modern Love” video comes to us by way of London-based animators and ADC Young Guns 12 winners Moth Collective. Entitled “A Kiss, Deferred”, the video tells the story of childhood love interrupted by the Yugoslav Wars.

“As soon as we heard this was a story based in Yugoslavia in the 90s, we started doing research on Yugoslavian imagery of that era and collecting archival pictures,” says Moth. “We made a color palette based on some poster art we came across and that we felt looked quite Balkan. We wanted the style to be minimal yet sensitive, so we chose a graphic approach for the backgrounds and a gentler one for the characters, something that is also reflected in the animation techniques and styles that we chose to achieve it.”

Given a mere four weeks to create the video, Moth Collective was nonetheless very pleased with the end result. “In terms of the nature of the project, we felt it was ideal for the kind of work we like to get involved in: personal and interesting narratives of people that we can hopefully bring into life through sensitive design and animation.”

CREDITS:
Design & Direction: Moth Collective
Producer: Nicholas van der Kolk
Writer: Nikolina Kulidžan
Animation: Marcus Armitage, Joe Bichard, Jonathan Djob Nkondo, Noriko Ishibe, Eamonn O’ Neill, Claudio Salas, Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits
Sound Design: Nicholas van der Kolk
Client: The New York Times
Production year: 2015

Special thanks to Joe Donaldson