Our studio was delighted to once again be asked by Adobe to create the Opening Experience for the MAX Creativity Conference in Los Angeles.
We love getting to work under the incredible guidance of the Adobe Events team, led by Nicole Williams and Joe Buchwald, and are super proud of what we've created together.
The look for the video was inspired by the show’s key identity art, provided by the Adobe Studio team, which we called "The Form." There was something very interesting about the smooth, fluid shape broken and sliced apart but still mechanically connected... the delicate balance of nature and machine.
Our concept for the experience, helmed by our animation director Stephen Gifford, was to explore the beautiful collision of nature overtaking machine, and machine overtaking nature. The style was a blend of surrealism, op art, glitch art, and photorealistic dreamscapes and artificial structures. Some scenes began as organic environments and we reimagined how they could be constructed mechanically. Other scenes were designed as abstract sliced forms and then were made over to feel more natural and alive. The result is a mixture of styles and disciplines from hand drawn cell animation to photo-real CGI to infinite zoom gifs and even a DRAGON made of iridescent glass! We held nothing back.
Design and Motion work by Pretty Damn Sweet along with some talented friends and close collaborators Chris Lee, Rich Nosworthy, Danny Ivan, Joshua Smith, Preston Smith, and Rodrigo Miguel.
Animated to the ROCKIN tune “Times Like These” by The Foo Fighters.
15,000 cheering attendees. 76 million pixels rendered per frame. The length of half a football field and 2 stories high. We love looking at these on our monitors and devices, but to experience the art at that scale, with projection mapping that teases the eyes and dazzles the senses, is a truly unforgettable experience.
Creating work for large screens is the same approach but a different process. Typically when making a single screen video for web or broadcast, adding design complexities and render-intensive materials and lighting wouldn't be a concern. But when working at a resolution of 28,340 x 2,688, even the smallest increase in render times add up pretty quickly when multiplied across all screens. So it's important to strategize how to achieve the look we want without running into issues in the final output. It just comes down to having a good process. Our technical team, led by our Technical Director Rick Sebeck, stays ahead of it by utilizing our powerful back end processes that offer everything from daily output testing on our custom-built render farm, to pre-visualizing the output on the screens in real time to keep a close eye on the visual integrity of the media as we develop.
Regardless of the scale, we never stop pushing the creative and the limits of our technology and our imaginations. Dream it up, then make it happen. Everything else is just the process and the journey.
Some early development work by our talented friend Danny Ivan exploring how to disrupt the Form in terms of texture and shape.
Some of our designs were used by the Adobe Events team to create some stunning scenic backdrops for the show. Shoutout to Chris Lee and Rich Nosworthy for these designs.
