INVISIBLE

Our starting point is five base forms, each illustrating an aspect of our craft. Slightly complex and puzzle-like, they are blank canvases representing the client brief. These thought starters feature throughout INVISIBLE, giving us a platform to demonstrate the fundamentals of our studio practice. Through each chapter, we reveal the layers of thinking, building and craft that go into our work and how these fundamentals add up to create visual results that immerse our audience, engage the senses, and evoke emotion.

We explore the fundamentals of form and fabrication through an evolution of shape and structure. This chapter celebrates our understanding of how things work and fit together and how they exist and behave in a three-dimensional space.

Here, we take the viewer on an inward journey through a series of cellular renders. We learn more the closer we get, and via an AI up-res tool, the detail is reinvented every time we push in. This voyage of digital discovery reveals new detail, texture and colour at every step.

Another invisible aspect of our everyday practice is light. When this simplest of components is choreographed as part of an animated sequence, we can affect mood, legibility, tension and drama. We can even evoke behavioural and emotional responses.

Combining the fundamental aspects of our practice allows us to turn our tools to visualising the intangible world of emotion. This chapter swings between moods to evoke feelings as polarised as the intensity of anger to the serene quietness of calm.

Finally, we all share a set of senses that help us navigate the world. Here we push our techniques further to bring invisible attributes of scent, taste and touch to life. Evolving aroma complexes, mouth feel and flavour notes sit next to visual investigations into tactility of surface and form.

Through a series of specimen tables, we plot a journey through the layers of a project’s evolution. Creative developments appear as collections of creative artefacts arranged in sequence so evolutions of ideas can be followed and compared. We map out our creative paths and offer fleeting glimpses into the decision-making processes. This shows how briefs develop, the different routes that open up and the creative results that don’t always make the final cut.

Each table gradually reveals our core studio processes. We present this through physical tables consisting of screen and CGI animation and a series of compartments. The physical aspect is a crucial part of the experience, designed to conceal parts of the content. This encourages the audience to engage from all angles, move around the tables and discover the work in new ways – a proven method of engaging and rewarding the viewer so they form closer connections with the work.

Dennis Georgiou (First Network), Katherine Templar Lewis (Kinda Studios), Lorna Houlahan, Paul Brandi (Fine Grain Carpentry), Paul James Dalton, Rob Coke and Sylvie Minois.