When OFFF approached us with the open brief for their visual campaign, we embraced an opportunity to create a completely different 3D look. Known for our glossy product renders and high-fidelity imagery, the OFFF campaign posed as a stage for something more tactile and fantastical. Leaning on the breadth of the creative process as inspiration, we envisioned emotions as actual characters, having them interact and explore the minimal black world of the subconscious. Playful craft and technical prowess combine in our hero film for the much-loved annual design festival.

Every year OFFF Barcelona festival approaches a design studio to create the visual identity for the entire festival.

OFFF festival is about coming together. It’s a melting pot of creative minds, and a great opportunity to put faces to names in the world of hybrid working with speakers spanning all areas of the design and motion industry. Our film speaks to the core emotions we all feel working as creatives.

An open brief presents a host of challenges, but given the range of speakers/attendees at OFFF, we knew we could roll with a more outlandish approach than many may associate with our studio. It was the perfect opportunity to apply our Design By Doing methodology, casting the net wide and giving both our London and LA teams time to explore.

This alone was a telling exercise - as our design team conjured up their own representations of fulfilment, curiosity, nerves and even burnout, there were many great talking points on how we truly feel during our working lives. Staff from all levels of the business contributed, making it a real bastion for studio culture. In these times, we’re incredibly fortunate to do what we do for a living, and the OFFF LIFFFE/FFFORMS film celebrates just that.

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.