STORY HUNTERS

“The right story can change the world.”

Story Hunters was developed as an animated documentary short film that would introduce audiences to a ragtag crew of post-climate apocalypse survivors who believe a single story has the power to change the world.

Told through four distinctly unique animation styles that either represent one of our narrators or the harsh world they find themselves living in, we follow this team on a mission to uncover the one story that will inspire humanity to hope again and to remind that world that no matter how dire the situation may be that as long as we are still here humanity still has a chance to course-correct and fix the damage done by generations that came before.

Equal parts climate advocacy and creative experiment, Story Hunters began as internal project while was Creative Director at MOWE Studio, intended to engage potential clients and define MOWE as a powerhouse creative strategic agency and production studio in the form of a boutique. The project quickly grew to become a passion piece that would challenge our team to explore new techniques while showing off the wide range of the studio's artistic and technical capabilities.

As can happen with internal projects, our ambition crept larger than the initial scope during two years of development, and upon review we found that the studio's priorities had changed. Funding was shifting elsewhere, and so we made the difficult decision to put the project to rest before beginning animation. Nearly all creative development on was completed at the time of shutdown, with a locked script, storyboards, animatic and one style frame completed at the time.

In 2026, the project finally received its moment in the light as the original style frame—and three additional concept frames based on the developed storyboards—were exhibited at the Design Graveyard pop-up gallery in Chicago, IL.

This page shares those explorations and more, along with character sketches, storyboards and the animatic the team at MOWE had cut before the project was sunset, to show what could have been.

Animatic

(silent)

The animatic below shows our storyboard, timed out as the film would have been edited. Sound has been removed.

Concept Sketches

Concept Frames

The concept designs below explore the aesthetic that each world style might have embodied, showing the wide ranging almost mixed-media feeling the project would have embodied, within the animated world.

One style explores the time distorted nostalgia of an elder’s remembrance of their youth in art style converging on the intersection where Golden Age Disney meets Impressionism meets American Realism. Another ventures into abstraction, blending minimalist motion graphics with featureless figures, sheets of color and vast clean backgrounds. A third style imagines how a frugal left-brained management type with limited resources might tell a visual story, which led us to a layered paper and cardboard cut-out style intended to feel like an advanced version of a grade-school poster-board presentation. And a harshly lean line art style with a largely monochromatic orange environment and rough edged characters adorned with limited colors was designed to represent the shared world of our story hunting crew, as seen through the lens of a documentary camera.