2025: A Year of Festivals, Families, and Films for Good

2025 has been a whirlwind of festival trips, important conversations, and creating characters that help make the world a little brighter. We have loved every minute of telling stories that matter, from supporting families to highlighting mental health.

Here is a look at what we have been up to.

OUR BIGGEST CELEBRATION

This year, our very own short film, Of All The Things, took centre stage. It had its premiere during Hoarding Awareness Week, which was a very special moment for us.

The excitement did not stop there! The film is currently on it’s festival run, including stops at BAFTA and BIFA accredited festivals. We packed our bags and headed to Bolton, Aesthetica, Women Over 50’s Festival, and the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. It was a joy to see our work on the big screen and meet so many lovely people along the way. We also had our first international screening at SCAD Savannah Film Festival and have been nominated for the Royal Television Society Midlands Awards for Best Animation.

MAKING SOME NOISE (NEW SONGS!)

We are super excited as have created two brand new animated songs for children with music from the wonderful Snazzy Badgers. It is such a fun and catchy way to help little ones learn and we’ve absolutely loved it!

We have been creating a fun song to help families navigate moving house, and a toothbrush timer to help children understand the importance of brushing and dental health. These will be released early 2026 so keep an eye out for them on our socials.

This is exactly the type of work we want to do more of. If you need a catchy tune and some colourful characters to match, we are ready!

CHAMPIONING MENTAL HEALTH

Mental Health Awareness and support is something we’re super passionate about at Kino Bino. Earlier this year we worked locally with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust to create 4 short films for The Neighbourhood Mental Health Cafés.

These films share the experiences of who had used the cafes. It was great to shine a light on these safe, welcoming spaces for people who need support.

We also partnered with BBC Ideas to share one womans story on how hoarding impacted her life - and her road to recovery. It was an honour to be part of helping to explain this complex condition to a much wider audience.

SUPPORT FOR FAMILIES

We have been busy continuing creating resources to support parents, carers, and children.

It has been a joy supporting families this year. We worked with Iliffe Ward and the NSPCC for on a short film for their perinatal education programme 'Baby Steps' and locally created a video for Leicester Mammas to use in healthcare settings to raise awareness of their free infant feeding support.

Watch the NSPCC ‘Baby Steps’ video

Watch our Infant Feeding Support Film

We are also super proud of the animated series we produced for the 'Health for Kids' Speech & Language Toolkit. We love creating educational content that supports digital learning for parents. Our films help make the expert advice simple and fun, covering everything from first words to school transitions.

COLLABORATING WITH LOCAL FRIENDS

We are proud of our Leicester roots and love working with our neighbours. We worked with an old Kino Bino friend, Mel’s British Voice, on a children’s song where she sourced and directed some wonderful voice talent for us. And we finished up on a project for Link with the lovely folks at Cite, a local agency, to create some really impactful work. It is always a pleasure to collaborate with other creative teams right here on our doorstep and we’re super proud of the infographics and animated films we created together.

AND ONE MORE THING…

We have launched our new Museum and Heritage service page.

We have so much lovely work in this sector and loved putting together our new reel. If you have any heritage projects you want bringing to life with animation then drop us a message.

Thank you to everyone who worked with us, watched our films, or cheered us on in 2025.

Here is to a COLOURFUL AND CREATIVE 2026!

Watch our Museum & Heritage Animation Showreel

2022 - Year in Review

BBC Teach - Primary School Songs

2022 has been a very productive year for Kino Bino studio. We have expanded the team, employing two animation graduates Mhari Sibeth & Kathryn Flynn. These superstars have been integral to all our productions this year bringing the enthusiasm of youth and fresh new design styles to the studio.

CHILD-FOCUSED

At the start of 2022 we completed a new project for BBC Teach. This time around we created five fun animated songs for reception-age children all about school. We had a great time designing this group of diverse characters and animating the cool dance moves.

We helped the National Trust with an exciting new audio tour at The Children’s Country House at Sudbury. Commissioning the fab Gary Chudleigh to write the scripts and casting local voice actors to bring an exciting new audio experience for children visitors.

HEALTHCARE

Sunny Period - Applicator Coming in Spring

Amaze.org commissioned us to create two new sex education explainers about Menopause & Endometriosis. We were excited to work with American scriptwriter Sam Bissonnette to bring our Kino Bino character Sam back, this time with her cool Auntie Jo & her non-binary bestie Ash. Look out for these on the Amaze.org site in the New Year.

We enjoy supporting great causes and charities that big up Women's Health & people that menstruate, so we were more than happy to help period poverty charity Bloody Good Period with some GIFs for their #noshamehere campaign. This followed with another project we were really passionate about for Sunny Period, which creates products for eco-conscious people. Sunny needed an animated instruction video for their innovative new product ‘The Sunny Cup & Applicator’. We can’t wait to see our video alongside the product launch in 2023.

Bloody Good Period #noshamehere campaign - design by Kathryn Flynn

The Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust ask us to produce a suite of 14 animated explainer videos for their Healthy Together campaign. Including videos on important subjects like Body Image, Exam Stress, and Transitioning to Primary & Secondary School for National websites: Health for Under 5s, Health for Kids & Health for Teens. Although all delivered now - these will continue to roll out over the following year and we look forward to sharing them.

BUSY BEANS

It was a very busy year for our Creative Director Steff Lee, not only did she have the beautiful bouncy baby, Nina but on returning from maternity leave she took over the PANimation Instagram for a week and was invited to join Creative UK’s Female Founders. Steff is already putting into practice The Female Founders invaluable advice and will be continued to be mentored over the following year with ways to build on the success of Kino Bino.

Our Producer Bella was lucky enough to win a ticket to the Children’s Media Conference through Animated Women UK sponsored by Wildchild Animation. She spent a few days catching up with old friends in the industry, making lots of new contacts and being inspired by all the amazing talks - she can’t wait to start to develop new original children’s series ideas with the team in 2023.

Alongside all the client work we also started production on our very own short film ‘Of All the Things’ being supported by the BFI Hub Midlands and funded by the National Lottery. An amazing crew of women (& our brilliant Technical Director, Jack) are bringing Director Steff’s long planned idea into fruition and we can’t wait to share the finished film in 2023.

LOCAL PROJECTS

We delivered a lovely project for local company Platform Thirty1, a women led organisation working across the arts, culture, community and education sectors in the East Midlands. We produced four animations for their ‘Greater Creative’ initiative - based on some oral histories from the amazing mining community in Blackwell Parish, Derbyshire. The local community have loved seeing their stories come alive!

We were also involved in a couple of local Leicester events. Steff & Jack got the spray cans out and joined in with Bring the Paint. We were also selected to exhibit our work in the annual LCB exhibition Graphics Season.

Leicester City Council commissioned us to help with their Live Well Little Ones campaign. We initially started with a logo design and illustrations and will be bringing these to life next year with a full animated video.

WHAT’S NEXT?

With commissions already in from BBC Bitesize and further NHS & charity projects, 2023 is set to be another productive year for the studio. If you want to book your animation project for 2023 contact us soon!