If you told Harold Moss his work wasn’t perfect, he’d probably take it as a compliment.

”I think a lot of graphic and motion-graphic design work feels very slick and shiny,” says Moss, founder and creative director of the New York design firm FlickerLab. “I like the imperfections that came when things were made more by hand. It’s the sense of something that was drawn with paper and pencil and colored in, cut out and pasted somewhere, even if we aren’t necessarily doing it with physical paper.”

According to Moss, it’s the same thing that drives some music producers to use old tube amplifiers. “There’s a warmth there. And I think the same thing is true visually, when you’re not trying to smooth everything and make it crystalline perfect.”

“I like the imperfections that came when things were made more by hand. It’s the sense of something that was drawn with paper and pencil and colored in, cut out and pasted somewhere, even if we aren’t necessarily doing it with physical paper.”

Instead of pencil and paper, Moss and his staff take a slightly higher-tech approach in pursuit of their hand-made aesthetic, working their digital magic on any of FlickerLab’s 20 Power Mac G5s to produce animated shorts, commercials, show opens, film titles, special effects and other projects for an ever-growing list of high-profile clients.

Leaps and Bounds

On cable’s Bravo, for instance, you can see FlickerLab’s clever animated opening sequences (also called “show opens”) for “Celebrity Poker Showdown” and “Everything I Hate About You.” For “Drew Carey’s Green Screen,” a new WB Network comedy that combines live action and animation, Carey selected Moss to illustrate several episodes in the show’s first season. And FlickerLab’s graphics also open the upcoming Lifetime special “Popping the Question,” as well as the new Discovery Home Network cooking show “Rosemary, Queen of the Kitchen.”

Moss has also enjoyed a longstanding collaboration with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who used Moss’s animations in “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 911.” The two also worked on a music video for the band System of a Down, called “Boom.”

When FlickerLab’s business grew by leaps and bounds this past year, Moss expanded the studio’s technology capabilities to handle the influx of creatively demanding new projects. “We weren’t quite realizing we were in the process of blowing up, because you never quite realize it until you’re in the middle of it,” he says, laughing. “But yeah, things have just gone through the roof.”

The Speed of Development

At the moment, explains Moss, FlickerLab animators have taken over 17 of the studio’s 20 Power Mac G5s to complete an eight-minute short for a well-known consumer products company. They tapped FlickerLab to develop the short film as an eye-catching alternative to a traditional TV ad campaign. It’s set to air during an upcoming TV movie.

Moss recently upgraded FlickerLab’s editing software to Final Cut Pro HD to handle both high-definition and standard-definition non-linear editing. “One of the things that overall impressed me so much [about Final Cut Pro] is the speed of its development, that it doesn’t feel like software that’s resting on its laurels at all,” says Moss. “And now with HDTV being built in and everything, it just seems like you just see the thing continually evolve and get more powerful. And its usability — it’s just why I love working on Macs. I sit down and it makes sense.”

Next page: Bringing High Definition In-house