Our task was to design and direct the visual brand campaign for OFFF Barcelona 2024. This festival of creativity is a world-renowned showcase of contemporary visual culture and design, its audience being anyone in the creative community.

We wanted to capture the collective OFFF experience, so we developed ideas around personalities, moods and feelings. This led us to our concept of ‘LIFFFE-FFFORMS’: Abstract manifestations of emotions and feelings associated with the creative process.

It was important to address both negative and positive emotions: Curiosity, Excitement, , Daydream, Burnout, Fulfilment, Anxiety, Isolation and Connection. Knowing they would feature around the festival space not only on film but across posters and banners, we wanted them to resonate on some level with everyone at OFFF. And much like the attendees, we wanted the LIFFFE-FFFORMS to descend in their thousands, gathering en masse in a final scene.

Our studio is synonymous with high-end product design and hyper-real renders. The OFFF campaign presented an opportunity to step away from this and test our skills with a vibrant approach that combined the 2D and 3D worlds to bring to life some highly memorable characters.

We created the characters in 3D which allowed us to animate them in specific ways, using crowd sims. However, their materiality was conceptualised in 2D. We wanted something tactile, different and unexpected, meaning much of our development time went into marrying up the two forms, giving our 3D characters a highly designed 2D finish.

As well as working in motion, we wanted each character to be strangely beautiful as a standalone object, so we drew inspiration from makers of abstract homewares and ceramics, such as Studio Arhoj. Whilst the dynamics and composition of the film itself were influenced by works like Disney’s Fantasia.