Alistair Nicholls claymates Couchella for Coachella

The brief went a little like this: RW Media (the agency): Can you create a spot letting people know they can live-stream the Coachella festival at home? Let's call it Couchella.

Alistair Nicholls (the animator): Sure thing. Anything else I need to know? RW Media: We trust you.

So, Alistair jumped in, no storyboard, and followed an instinctive and experimental process to come up with a lovely 30-second plasticine production that plays on the pun, and then some. With the seven-stage Californian music festival live and in full swing, his lively little promo is chalking up views right now on YouTube and Instagram, and you can watch it below.

"They were very open to ideas, so I was able to play around with the visual side. Some of the ideas I came up with while animating," says Alistair.

The piece features six brightly coloured, abstract characters who crash onto the set to a syncopated soundtrack – Breakdance by All Good Folks. One's a worm, another a blob. There's a green squiggle, an orange penguin, and a pair of trousers with a dubious nose.

"Some of them came from doodling in a sketchbook, but most just came while sculpting the plasticine, sort of improvising different shapes and figuring out where the eyes could go," says Alistair. "It was a really organic way of working. I just went with whatever idea came in at that moment, while sculpting."

The unplanned nature of the characters is paired with Alastair's loose animation style. He loves to keep it raw, and there is always an emphasis on the overall performance ahead of technical excellence in each frame. With his fingerprints clearly visible on the plasticine, a handmade aesthetic comes to the fore, and even though the characters are so odd, it has a very human feel, which is what live music is all about.

The colour palette is a little more coordinated. The blue sofa, door, and side table hold the room together, so the characters' own colours stand out. "I really wanted to give it more of a psychedelic look, so I used a lot of strong colours and contrasting tones," continues Alistair. "I felt it needed to be cohesive but also have the bright colours of the character."

Shooting each painstakingly posed frame with a Nikon D3300 DSLR camera, he sequenced the animation in Dragonframe. The most challenging shot is one that pans the sofa, which Alistair wanted to feel like a handheld camera move. "I ended up animating the camera while animating multiple characters, all moving at different speeds and in different directions. I think it turned out OK!" he says.

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Based in Norwich and London, Alistair's connection to stop-motion animation goes all the way back to his childhood, when he and his grandfather made films on the kitchen table using a Super-8 camera and cardboard and wooden characters. After graduating in Animation from the London College of Communication, he's become one of the UK's go-to short-format claymation animators, and his projects are getting bigger all the time.

"I'm trying to get funding together for a short stop-motion film I've written. It's sort of like a drama but with elements of surrealism, all done in stop-motion. Quite different from anything else I've made, so fingers crossed that comes together!" he says.