About MotionArt Studios
An association of designers, animators, and technophiles, MotionArt champions animation as a profoundly compelling medium that clarifies, influences, entertains, inspires and occasionally causes fights in bars. As producers and consultants, we’re current with the latest technology. Our work screens worldwide via the Internet, Cable and Broadcast TV, IMAX Theaters, the George Lucas Educational Network’s Edutopia, and SONY Wonder and acclaimed SIGGRAPH Electronic Theaters.
MotionArt Studios originated in Boston in 1982, and for 30 years has produced award-winning animation projects for Broadcast TV, Branding, IMAX, Corporate clients, Museums, International Non-Profits and the Internet. Our clients include ABC News 20/20, American Airlines, Continental Cablevision, General Motors, Honeywell, Interactive Medical Communications, The New York Transit Authority, Ocean Spray, Raytheon, Save the Children, the U.S. Department of Defense and UNICEF.
Through our LineStorm Digital FlipBook Creative Learning Projects, we use animation as a powerful vehicle for teaching and learning in schools, colleges, museums and corporate retreats.
Recent LineStorm projects at the M.I.T. Media Lab use hand-drawn animation and energetic typography to bring to life aphorisms accorded to Aristotle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The M.I.T.-student-animated LineStorm project, “Six Simple Machines”, won the 2011 Best Animation of the Year Award at the 13th Annual Made-at-M.I.T. Media Spectacle at the Ray and Maria Stata Center.
Please visit our Gallery page for a sampling of recent projects.
Pell Osborn, founder and director of MotionArt Studios, is an animator, designer and teacher. He is a member of SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group in Computer Graphics), and holds degrees from Kenyon College and Lesley University. He attended Harvard University for additional study in animation. He founded MotionArt Studios in Boston in 1982. Working in Nepal for UNICEF and Save the Children, in 1988-91, he co-founded Kathmandu’s first animation studio. Mr. Osborn’s life-long passion for animation led to the creation of the LineStorm Digital FlipBook Creative Learning Project, an award-winning curriculum that uses traditional and computer animation as vehicles for teaching and learning.
Mr. Osborn has directed LineStorm programs in schools and colleges in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in museums in Boston and New York City. He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University, M.I.T., the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Goethe Institute, the New York Hall of Science, the Peabody-Essex Museum, Boston’s Museum of Science, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Mr. Osborn teaches LineStorm at M.I.T.’s Student Art Association and the Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s High School for the Arts. He recently completed a major pilot program with Harvard Medical School’s Educational Outreach Programs in the Boston Public Schools, and a project on Powerful Influences of the Middle Ages in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Public Schools.