We wanted to create an allegory for the collaborative creative process. We meet. We create. We collide. We grow stronger and become better creatives. There is magic in that and we sought to celebrate it.

We expressed this in two ways; a linear film and an interactive experience, using experimental techniques that were new to us in an effort to ‘live’ the story we sought to tell, as if method acting through our creative process.

The visuals of the piece were inspired by mythology, sacred geometry and ancient symbols; captured via paintbrushes and dance, fused and augmented digitally.

It is best described as endless experimentation with techniques and processes we had never used or combined before.

Our desire was to fuse hand crafted analog arts with sophisticated digital tools, creating a hybridized experiment that embraced error, luck and classic elements of craft. All of the source materials were born in the ‘analog’ world using dance, painting and inks, which we translated into a digital space for the film and interactive experience.

We choreographed a dance piece and used motion capture to create digital avatars. We applied experimental particle systems to give them body and life. We shot chemical reactions and pooling inks to create textures for the world and projected them onto 3D geometry. The typography was designed by hand as painted calligraphy, which we translated into 3D space.

We then mapped the work for the film into a real time 3D engine to create a browser based interactive world, allowing visitors to create alongside our characters. They could navigate, explore and paint their own creations, capturing their scenes as GIFS to be shared via social media.

We believe the end result is a transportive, haunting meditation on what it means to think and make things with other people. This is an ancient exercise, fraught with emotion and ego that can be identified with by creative folk. We would hope that it inspires all of us to experiment fearlessly and make art with others, making this a powerful sequence to launch a community gathering about design, filmmaking and technology.

We were commissioned by the OFFF Festival; a series of creative conferences and workshops, to create an opening sequence for their first conference in Russia. Held in St. Petersburg, a city with a rich history of storytelling, the sequence is titled ‘Skazka’ which roughly translates from Russian to “that which is told.” Like many tales told throughout time, the narrative features never-ending cycles of love and hate, creation and destruction, revealing the parallels between creative and romantic partnerships.