Context
As part of UT Austin's partnership with Gensler's Digital Experience Design (DXD) division, I worked in collaboration with Gensler DXD and UT Austin stakeholders to animate a welcoming installation for the media wall in Gensler Austin's office lobby.
Brief
I was tasked with illustrating Gensler's "1FirmFirm" mission. According to co-CEO Andy Cohen, 1FirmFirm means that "you have to have this sense of pride that you want to deliver anywhere in the world, that it’s not just a division or one office." As Gensler has 50 offices all over the world that frequently collaborate on projects, my job was to showcase the reach of this unique global network.
Initial Pitch
Inspired by the way Gensler displays its offices as dots on a map, I wanted to combine vector and traditional animation to "build" a few of Gensler's iconic structures via the offices that collaborated to design them. Taking into account the transitory nature of the lobby, I stayed away from linear narratives that would require close attention.
Concerns
After some tests, I realised that animating the dots into buildings would be too time-intensive. Including quotes was also out of scope, so I removed that aspect of the piece and modified the animation to be a timelapse of a digital painting instead.
Original rough sketch in Procreate for my pitch deck (before I chose my actual subjects).
The original idea for the Shanghai Tower painting, this remained unchanged for most of the process.
Near the end, I changed the colours for Shanghai Tower to bring this piece in line with the rest.
Final Shanghai Tower painting with animated decorative elements on top!
Work-In-Progress
This was the process from rough draft to final in terms of style and tone progression. As Gensler's screen had black bars at the top due to LED limitations, I composed my paintings to make sure nothing important was cut off. In terms of subject matter, I tried to showcase five Gensler buildings around the world that were created by diverse international teams to truly represent "1FirmFirm."
Q2 Stadium
Cadillac House
The Gate
NVIDIA HQ
Shanghai Tower
Final Pieces
Many iterations later, these were the paintings that I brought into After Effects. Text and decorative elements were animated on top of each piece. Every "timelapse" is the result of a frame-by-frame sequence exported from Photoshop. The globe animation, for example, was comprised of 15 hand painted frames of the globe rotating.
Side view of how the animation would look in Gensler's space.
Front view of the space.
Assets
3 minute mixed-media (vector and hand-painted) animation composited in After Effects. Delivered in MP4 and ProRes MOV.
Result
Due to COVID, my cohort was unable to visit the Gensler office to see our work in person, but we were told that employees were delighted to return to new art in their space. My intention with this piece was to reflect Gensler's push towards modernity (through vector) while highlighting the human touch (through painting) crucial to success in all creative disciplines—especially in the context of the "1FirmFirm" philosophy of the world's largest architecture and design company.
