As a 3D motion design studio, we have the good fortune of working on diverse projects across a variety of industries and subject matters. This sees us wear many hats, researching and engaging with our clients’ worlds. Leaning into topics like microplastics, automotive design or next-generation processing technology, we embrace the opportunity to explore new areas and expand our expertise.
Our curiosity forces us to consider other disciplines and ways of making things too. By examining and understanding different viewpoints, techniques and alternative approaches, we can reflect on our own practice and process of making.
Embarking on this project for London Craft Week opened our eyes to the world of craft and made us ask questions about what it represents and how it can be defined. Exploring the differences between craft and design brought our own expertise into the debate.
We often use the term craft to refer to the care and attention that goes into creating our work and the fundamental aspects that go into making it. The ‘craft’ of filmmaking, modelling, cinematography, animation and storytelling can be found in everything we do.
Where does digital 3D design stand in the landscape of craft? How much of what we already do could be considered craft?”
When we step back and look at the bigger picture of making, we see many crossovers and commonalities between disciplines. There will always be a difference between making work by hand with real-world materials and creating things digitally. But, we’re interested in the future of digital design and whether this can both inform, and be informed by, physical making and whether digital and physical forms can sit side by side in the diverse and evolving world of craft.
This project has deepened our appreciation and understanding of craft as a whole and has seen us reflect on how we create. Looking forward in this rapidly changing world, we believe our dedication, skill and passion truly define us as craftspeople, regardless of the tools we use.
We started by looking at the broad and diverse range of techniques and materials represented by events at London Craft Week. We also learned from TM about the latest developments in digital printing and how we might integrate them into the campaign. All of these pointed towards a solution based on multiples, uniqueness and variety.
Early in the process, it was important to consider the ways in which our tools and systems could offer variety at a level and quantity that would exploit the printing innovation without requiring a huge amount of design work and time.
We wanted to explore how we could portray London Craft Week and the extent of what it represents more broadly than a single hero image could.”
Experimenting with automation within our everyday software, Cinema 4D, Unreal Engine, and Houdini, we landed on an approach that facilitated the idea of iteration. Importantly, this solution did so within parameters determined and controlled by our designers. This idea of control was something that we wanted to be sure of amid all the current conversations around automation and AI. Where we landed gave us a designer-controlled process and amplified our designers’ ability to explore.
Working this way ticked all the boxes for us. It allowed us to build a form exactly as we wanted; efficiently varying its shape, materiality, scale, position — you name it. This tool helped us explore multiple iterations of any aspect or parameter because we had created the starting point.
An iteration test using a cubic form. The material, scale and lighting parameters remained constant with the inner structure iterated.
We started our research and development process by testing this iteration technique. By selecting the parameters of a base vessel (diameter, for example) and setting a minimum to a maximum threshold, we asked the system to output a specified number of results. This method allowed us to explore everything from material type and physical form to lighting setups and colour variation. Anything that we had originally built could be iterated on.
The wider we set the thresholds, the more extreme the results we started to see, but by keeping the parameter threshold quite tight, we created sets of unique forms within the same materiality and lighting set-up. This refinement process gave us a set of individual ‘one-offs’ that sat together as a cohesive edition – striking the perfect balance for use as a campaign asset.
As we further developed the process, we focused our base form exploration on a classic vessel shape: a vase. We extracted cross- sections from it, which gave us a series of circles. These simple shapes, which in combination describe the vase’s outer edges, were ‘remixed’ to achieve a new, unique vessel form that retained the DNA of the original vase.
An initial sequence starting with one hero vessel expanded out into a wider edition by iterating its structural diameter.
Extracting core shapes from a typical vessel form and remixing them to create new objects.
Our iteration process was akin to closing the door on the kiln filled with a series of glazed pots. In this example, the potter has a good idea of what will come out but can’t fully predict the results. In our process, we had to similarly embrace the sense of the unknown and accept the results that the process handed us.
The final series of 1,000 images, seen throughout this book, went out into the world across all campaign assets, guide covers, posters, out-of-home and social platforms. Making full use of the wider image pool, we were confident that regardless of which form was used, or seen in use, it would still clearly read as part of the project as a whole.
When considering the potential future of craft, we’re faced with more questions: Given our similarities such as materiality, use of texture and form, do we stick to tradition, respecting processes and material properties, or do we embrace new tools and break free from convention? What happens when we break those material rules and traditions, and how might we categorise the results?
Does crafting require direct contact between a human hand and materials, or can work that remains on a screen achieve the status of craft?”
As we explore these questions, it makes us think: is the craft community embracing digital making as part of its fold, or do we recognise that our influence on each other’s practices resembles that of distant cousins rather than close siblings? It’s a dynamic landscape where tradition, innovation, ideas, and human touch sculpt the future of creation—a evolutionary path rich with the potential to shape the future of craft.
Want to keep reading?
Read about about previous exhibition here:
INVISIBLE, a subsurface exploration
