Studio Dumbar/DEPT® x DEMO x Cavalry
Discover how animation software Cavalry helped international design agency Studio Dumbar/DEPT® create the promotional content for their recent DEMO festival.
As long time admirers of Studio Dumbar/DEPT®’s work and the festival we were thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the team on the project.
Not only was Cavalry used as part of creating the branding for the festival but work created using Cavalry could also be found on display at the exhibition too!
We asked Studio Dumbar/DEPT®’s Creative Director and Partner Liza Enebeis and Creative Coder Sander Sturing to tell us about their experience…
Can you give us a bit of background on DEMO?
The idea for DEMO (DEsign in MOtion) Festival was driven by wanting to share the beautiful work we were seeing with a wider audience. A lot of the work that inspires us on a daily basis is usually shared on Instagram and limited to the eyes of designers — we specifically wanted to organise DEMO in the public space.
Outdoor screens and displays stand like modern digital statues in places where there is a lot of public movement. However, the character of the creative products on display is always commercial. By using the screens in an alternative way we hope to inspire designers, the public and brands to use the screens in a more creative way.
To sum it up, DEMO Festival celebrates motion design.
In 2019 we partnered with Global, owners of the DOOH (digital out of home) screens at Dutch train stations, to organise the first DEMO Festival taking over all 80+ screens at Amsterdam Central Train Station by replacing the regular advertisements you’d normally see with animation and motion design from designers all over the world.
The open call attracted over 2500 submissions and, with a team of curators, we created the 24 hour exhibition.
In 2022 we went a big step further extending the partnership to nearly all owners of the 5000 DOOH screens across the Netherlands including train stations, shopping malls, parking centres, highways — you name it. This time, more than 2000 designers from all over the world submitted over 5000 motion pieces which were curated to create an exhibition of 800 beautiful 10-second motion pieces in all shapes and forms. It was an amazing experience and a big celebration of motion design for all to see!
This time, more than 2000 designers from all over the world submitted over 5000 motion pieces.
How was Cavalry used on the project?
All the motion design we did for the DEMO Festival identity was made in Cavalry. A team of different motion designers customised the same base setup to generate all the content.
A motion design festival needs a LOT of motion design assets!
This included speaker introductions, special guest announcements, categories, updates and countdowns plus things like category bumpers shown on the DOOH screens and the credits for the designers involved. Oh, and logo animations, sponsor announcements, website assets — you name it. A motion design festival needs a LOT of motion design assets!
So, why Cavalry?
We were already experimenting with Cavalry at the time the new exhibition was approaching and it felt like it could be a good fit for DEMO’s dynamic identity.
We developed the original identity in code (Processing) as we couldn’t find a way to recreate the concept we were going for in the traditional software available at that time. While this approach gave us a lot of control over the visual outcome, it came with some drawbacks.
Because Processing doesn’t have a timeline as such we were hitting some inefficiencies in our production pipeline. We needed to output the animations before importing them into After Effects so they could be combined with other elements to create an actual final motion piece. Where retrospective changes were required (when are they not!?), this created a lot of back and forth between programs. In addition, as an internal tool with a primary focus on the end result, it was definitely not the most user-friendly from a UX point of view!
Our original solution also required the artwork to be rasterised. This meant that the motion work was pixel-based and, if you look very closely at 2019’s output, you can see the subtle imperfections this creates. Of course, rasterised artwork also makes scaling or preparing creative for print a bit of a struggle.
The Cavalry team helped us translate our Processing script into a JavaScript Deformer which meant we could apply the squeezing, squashing and stretching of objects directly in our motion design software. Our artists could then extend the feature themselves within Cavalry by connecting the deformer to motion paths or add other elements that followed the same movement.
This combination of having our own custom tool within a powerful animation application that works directly with vector shapes is magic to us!
In addition, being able to code so extensively within the same software we’re using to craft the motion design work piqued the interest of everyone in the team with an affinity for code and (motion) design — which is almost all of us 😉.
Were there any particular pieces of the branding work produced with Cavalry that you loved?
We really like pieces like the countdown animations. These were created by animating a secondary piece of content along the path of the distorted vector shape itself. This idea was not practical in our previous setup where, because the distortion effect was a separate pixel-based animation, our only option was to try to manually eyeball something to match it in After Effects.
Being able to control the motion of the big vector shape and have that connected to the secondary text opened the door for us to play around with this quite a lot!
Do you see Cavalry being a go-to software for Studio Dumbar/DEPT® in the future?
Yes! 😉.
We’re definitely not done with Cavalry! For us, it feels like it fills a gap we notice between creative coding and our motion/visual design software. We love the flexibility of code and the control it gives you to create a bespoke idea from scratch but also the ease of use of motion design software. Connecting these two can sometimes be a challenge and Cavalry seems to unite these disciplines nicely.
We are really falling in love with node-based design software (Blenders’ geometry nodes, Touch Designer etc.) that open up the door to integrate more generative and procedural design in our process. Cavalry embodies this approach and the power behind it but combines it with a more robust and motion designer-friendly interface. The best of both worlds!
A huge thanks to Liza, Sander and the Studio Dumbar/DEPT® team for letting us share their experience in this article — we’re very proud to have been associated with such a fantastic festival of motion design and have loved seeing all the work produced appear in our socials in the lead up to the festival.
Motion designers/animators/creative coders should definitely keep an eye out for next year’s festival and if you’re interested in sponsorship or can help out in any way then get in touch with the team.
