More Than You Expect
London-based agency Feref came to me and asked if I would be able to design and illustrate a mural to be painted by the staff frequenting Vodafone's Dusseldorf campus, designed to show off Vodafone's excellent own-brand smart handsets and tablets.
'No problem' I said.
And then it got complicated: we needed a number of canvasses- all to be painted concurrently, which would encapsulate the theme of being 'More Than You Expect'- the canvasses would each be a frame of a simple animation to be converted into a gif, and time would be tight.
And then I threw the Droste effect (an endless zoom) into the mix.
One frame of the Vodafone SmART Wall design- showing the complex repetition of the characters required to meake a convincing Droste effect when the final work is converted into a gif.
After coming up with a suite of characters to embody the features of the handsets that Vodafone wanted to call out, each had four frames in which to animate:
The Juggling Octopus represents the milti-tasking ability of the Smart Ultra Handsets and Tablets.
Vodafone have won several industry awards for the sleek and efficient design of their handsets- hence the blueprints within a gold trophy.
They take smart to the next level.
And they're faster than fast!
After testing the animation digitally, I decided to use the tried and tested 'Paint by Numbers' system so that everyone would paint the correct colour in the right place! All that remained was to go over to the campus and, in two intense days of painting featuring over 400 volunteers and gallons of paint, paint the four 5m wide canvasses....
Timelapse footage of the four paintings underway.
After a bit of digital trickery (the perceptive amongst you will see that four frames isn't enough to manually paint the zoom- so the droste effect was added afterwards) the four frames are all married up and make an endlessly zooming gif!
From Digital to analogue and back again!
