A Creative Retreat at Villa Lena
This post has been written by Ani Karamanukyan, our studio coordinator, that reported throughout the days the main highlights of our stay in Villa Lena, a magical place in the middle of nowhere in Tuscany.
Illo has a long history of studio trips. If you’ve been following us in the past years, you know that we’ve been to Barcelona together for OFFF festival, we’ve been to Vancouver for Blend, and so on.
This year our studio trip was dedicated to mindfulness in a beautiful but remote place — a villa in the charming hills of Tuscany.
We came to Villa Lena with the intention of developing personal projects in a calm environment away from our usual hectic and frenetic city lives.
It’s a time of reflection: we’re going to dedicate it to self-exploration to bring out our personal projects that we wanted to get our hands on for a while.
This article is my personal “diary” (and by coincidence — my personal project) which will contain some insights that I collected from all the illoers during our stay.
Day 0 — Getting Ready
We knew we were going to spend these days working on a project or even many of them. We didn’t know about the constraints but after a quick conversation with the whole team, here are the key ideas revealed:
- develop your project according to your personal ambitions of growth
- make time for your own self, isolate yourself to listen to your inner thoughts
- choose analog over digital if you can
- treat this project as personally as you can
Day 1 — The Road | Inspiration
We left Turin at 10 am and got to Villa Lena in the late afternoon. We had an extended lunch break in Liguria in a small town called Sarzana where we had the best focaccia of our lives.
Villa Lena is on top of a hill in central Tuscany, surrounded by a prevalently green panorama with beautiful olive and cypress trees. It’s so calm and quiet here sometimes that you can almost “hear” the silence.
When we arrived, I guess the first sensation for everyone was being overwhelmed with the beauty of this place.
Ever since our departure that morning, we were contemplating the purpose and the eventual outcome that this journey would have for every one of us. Some had ideas that they brought with them, others let themselves be inspired solely from this location, like Cristina — art-director at illo, who came to Villa Lena with the intention of embracing all the incitement that this place would provide. And it was the perfect plan for her, since it seems like inspiration is in every little detail here.
On the other hand, Luca — partner and director, had a clear idea of what he wanted to work on in these days. Being passionate about tech in general and especially AR recently, he knew he was going to focus on developing his skills in this field.
After a brief research he decided to develop a camera filter that we could all use for taking pictures!
The mirrored circular shapes make the whole thing look like one of those eye illusion images, and kind of reminds our logo, right? The second filter he developed scans your face and its movements and adds something like a creepy warp effect! We all had fun using the filters for our personal photos and videos!
Similarly, Arianna — designer, and Nima — data scientist, also had a pretty clear plan for the project that they were going to develop together: an interactive story, a fairy tale inspired by Nima’s Iranian origins. Arianna saw it as an opportunity to work in a style that is out of ordinary for her, while Nima would push himself to learn new skills in coding and animation.
They both agree that this opportunity is the most important aspect of this trip.
Day 2 — Concentration
The whole complex is divided into little units, where the main one, the Villa itself is where many artists from around the world stay during their artist residencies. It was amazing to be so close to so many talented creatives and see what they’re working on and how.
We were lucky to be able to do a workshop held by Bratislav Milenkovic, a super-talented illustrator from Belgrade, with whom we created some collages (it felt inspiring to work with some tangible materials for illustration), turned them into vector illustrations and animated!
The personal project of Ilenia — creative director and co-founder, was developing a series of works which all had the same subject but were executed in different techniques, which included also collage (together with painting, 2D illustration, and 3D illustration). So this workshop was like a warm-up for her.
Carla — designer and audio designer at illo, went to explore the nature surrounding the villa. She’s also the one who has the green thumb in the studio so she decided to explore the flora. She was definitely happy to be surrounded by the constant peace and the mild songs of the cicadas.
The Tuscan landscape and the fact that we had traveled to a significant topographic height inspired Laurentiu — animator, to orient his project around this theme — the landscape as it would appear from bird’s eye view.
Given that he usually works with designs that are realised by the designers of illo, his challenge for this project was to elaborate his own design and storyboard, and he also added a new technique — using 3D in the movements of the spheres to make them more realistic and finishing off everything “by hand” in After Effects.
The concept of travel is also tied to the main idea behind the project of Meo — animator. In his own words, he couldn’t imagine a summer vacation without traveling by bike and exploring Italian landscapes. That’s why he chose to pay homage to his favourite mean of transportation and pushed himself to model a bike in Cinema 4D — a software that he’s already familiar with but that he wants to master — to later animate it in different techniques.
DAY 3 — Combination
Saturday was probably all about combining work on the projects with relaxation and fun. It didn’t require much effort though, because even when we were concentrating on work, the whole environment made us feel like we’re on holiday.
We had the workshop in the morning, which boosted our productivity and we spent the rest of the day elaborating the outcomes and sharing feedback and impressions.
The intention of experimenting with new materials also manifested in a little DIY workshop that I held for the illoers to introduce them to watercolours and some of its techniques.
We had fun learning how to mix the colours, and how to obtain smooth gradients by painting little abstract shapes together.
DAY 4 — After
On Sunday morning we had another fun workshop, this time with clay, held by Natalia Blahova, a creative young ceramist who is based in Amsterdam. We did a little study on sculpting faces (mostly of each other, but also of other people who were present at the workshop).
I guess we had never really looked so closely at each other, it was fun to discover the many ways to represent Luca’s curly hair or Pinguino’s protruding eyes!
The immense amount of inspiration that this retreat has given to us is innumerable. I think we have enough incitement to deploy in our works for several months forward!
Of course we all felt a bit cheerless that our stay there was coming to its conclusion and we wished it could have lasted longer, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be doing something as inspiring next year!
Bye, Villa Lena!
