Mireia Costa
Freelance motion designer & animator · Barcelona, Spain
Twelve years of moving things around a screen for other people, most of it freelance. Broadcast packages, title sequences, explainer work when the rent is due. I have worked in five cities and out of a lot of borrowed desks, and I have finally stopped pretending that is a stopgap — it is how I like to work.
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The Credits
The Full Record
Experience
Freelance motion designerEstudi Costa
2020 — 2024My own practice — direct clients plus overflow work for four or five studios I trust.
Roughly 25 projects a year, from three-day cutdowns to six-week broadcast packages.
Two thirds of the work is repeat clients, which is the only freelance metric I actually watch.
Senior motion designer (contract)Nimbus Post
2019 — 2020Fourteen months embedded on a sports broadcast rebrand.
Built the After Effects template system the in-house team still runs; the point was to make myself unnecessary by the end.
Motion designerHalcyon Studio
2017 — 2019Title sequences and brand films for cultural clients.
First place I got to direct rather than execute, and the first place I found out how much of directing is scheduling.
AnimatorQuatre Quarts
2015 — 2017Character and 2D animation for agency work — mostly ads, one very long insurance explainer.
Learned French badly and cel animation properly.
Junior designerTaburet Creative
2013 — 2015Social cutdowns, lower thirds, whatever came in.
Three hundred deliverables a year taught me speed, which took another five years to unlearn where it mattered.
Design internColmena Films
2012 — 2013Made coffee, logged footage, was allowed to animate one end card.
That end card is why I do this.
Selected work
Copa Nord — broadcast packageNimbus Post · 2020
Full on-air identity for a regional football competition: opener, lower thirds, score bugs, twelve stadium variants. Ran for three seasons. Still the largest single thing I have delivered.
The Quiet CoastDocumentary title sequence · 2022
Visit ↗Ninety seconds of hand-animated coastline over archival stills. Six weeks, most of it spent on the first twelve frames. Screened at three festivals.
Museu del Disseny — wayfinding motionDirect client · 2023
Animated wayfinding and exhibition screens for a permanent gallery redesign. The brief was 'nothing should ever loop visibly', which turned out to be the whole project.
Vespre — nightly news refreshDirect client · 2024
Rebuilt an eleven-year-old news package for a regional broadcaster. Fully templated so a producer can build a segment without calling me at 19:40.
Banc Litoral — explainer seriesDirect client · 2021
Eight explainers about mortgage products. Not glamorous. Paid for the room I am typing this in and the client came back twice.
One Loop a WeekPersonal series · ongoing
Visit ↗A short animated loop every Friday since 2018. Over 300 of them. Three clients have hired me off a single loop, which is a better conversion rate than my actual portfolio.
Toolkit
Education
BA Graphic DesignEscola Massana, Barcelona
2009 — 2013Specialised in animation in the final two years.
Advanced Motion MethodsSchool of Motion
2016Clients
Mireia handed over a package our producers could actually operate. Three years later nobody has had to call a motion designer at eight in the evening.
We bring her in when a project is late and complicated. She asks two questions on Monday and there is something on screen by Wednesday.
She spent a fortnight on twelve frames and was right to. The sequence is the reason people remember the film.
Teaching & recognition
Guest tutor, Motion DesignEscola Massana, Barcelona
2021 — PresentOne week a term, third-year students. Mostly about how to quote a job.
Promax Europe — Gold, Sports IdentityCopa Nord broadcast package
2021Freelance for a DecadeTalk, OFFF Barcelona
2023Actual day rates, actual dry spells, and why I stopped chasing a studio job.