“Shynola is more like a band than we are” – Thom Yorke, Radiohead
Filmmakers and mixed-media artists Jason Groves, Chris Harding, and Richard ‘Kenny’ Kenworthy comprise the creative collective known as Shynola. The boys met at art college, bonding over a highly productive collaboration of films, painting, comics, poetry, even music. After they organized their own gallery show in London, archly named Shynola, the name stuck.
On graduation, Shynola sent a showreel of their signature animation to Mo’ Wax label head James Lavelle. Impressed, Lavelle commissioned a short film for the televised NME Brat Awards. This immediately led to music videos for artists such as Blur, Beck, Queens of the Stone Age, Coldplay, and particularly Radiohead, for whom they created a series of 20-second digital micro-movies or ‘blipverts’ for the iconic Kid A campaign.
Commercials clients quickly followed, leading to breakout work for Honda, Nike, McDonald’s, Hulu, and Sony PlayStation (for which they have received McLaren, CAD, D&AD, and British Animation awards).
You can also see their work in the title sequences for the feature film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the British series The IT Crowd, and Chris Morris’s Nathan Barley, and they created the on-screen eponymous guide for the feature version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Oscar-nominated DoP Barry Ackroyd shot their 2013 live-action dramatic short, Dr. Easy, about a robotic EMT deployed to defuse a human time bomb. It stars Tom Hollander and was produced by Film4.