I’ve been getting emails all month from knitters who think they’ve spotted knitted gnomes, snowmen, and other Mochimochi Land creatures on TV. If you’ve been watching Nickelodeon, you’re eyes are not deceiving you! Last month I had the opportunity to work with Nick on a series of animated holiday IDs featuring a variety of wintry mochis making mischief in the snow. If you tune in right now, you’ll probably see them airing between commercials!

I’m excited to share the full animations here.

Like with the other stop-motion videos and GIFs that I’ve made, the animations were created by moving the creatures a fraction of an inch and taking a photograph, and repeating that again and again until we had a series of hundreds of photos that could be put together to make one action happen. Then repeat. And repeat. Making a 10-second animation could take up to four hours, and that’s pretty good time for stop-motion!

I worked together with the Nick promotions team to concept and animate the first six IDs, with all the post-production work, including the sound and the flat animations, handled by Nick. The last four animations starring mochi-fied Nick characters were done by the Nick team themselves using materials I had made.

It was an incredible experience to get to work on these ambitiously-conceived animations with such a talented and enthusiastic team. I had a blast with this project, and I learned so much! The project has made me more excited about all the possibilities for mochis in motion.

Big thank-yous go to Matthew Duntemann at Nick and to my agent Koko for making this happen!