Type: Experience
My Role: Creative & Strategy
Agency: BEKK
Pushwagneseizer
- for ED Awards
In collaboration with Grafill, I helped Bekk conceptualize the theme of the ED Awards, "Making new connections". The goal was to create a unique experience for the visitors by uniting design and technology.
So, where do you start?
In short: outside the comfort zone. Outstanding solutions are often developed at the intersection of seemingly incompatible perspectives and thoughts. When things that usually do not belong together suddenly makes sense.
Or when people from widely different fields end up creating amazing solutions. But getting there is a challenge!
"We had to go through many creative stages and rounds before the idea of a Pushwagnesizer came. Such stages included those immediate thoughts right after the first briefing, many workshops, late nights, early meetings and ongoing testing of prototypes. It was incredibly fun to have so few boundaries, but equally challenging to solve the task within that open framework"
_Process
In disruptive waters
Friction is an inevitable part of a creative process and it can be painful. Strong personalities and strong opinions that want progress? Great! Tight deadlines and technical challenges throughout. Tiresome, yes, but also very effective.
“It was unfamiliar to work towards such an extremely hard deadline and so short duration. We knew that if we were half a day late, we had practically forfeited the whole chance. It was an incredible pressure, but it also means that you prioritize in completely different ways ”.
Joakim Tysseng, developer
_Challenge
The turning point
It’s late April 2018 and there are only a few weeks left before ED Festival is due to start. After many workshops, discarded directions and clear vocabulary, the team is well underway to develop a concept that takes analogue hand drawings and turns them into a vibrant, digital experience.
At the same time, Norway loses one of its great artist personalities in modern times. Terje Brofos, better known as Pushwagner, was 77 years old, and his passing affected many, both inside and outside the art environment. The incident also affected the direction the team had worked for a while. "When we learned about Terje's demise, the idea of connecting his art to the concept came. Pushwagner was an influential and respected artist who always pushed the boundaries. A personality that is going to be deeply missed, and which we think deserved this tribute when the ED Festival came to visit his birthplace,” says Nina Inberg, project manager and advisor at Bekk.
_The Build
From idea to code
Designers will often debate and deliberate. If it can actually be done, the developers know best. So when the developers on the team were served the idea of animating one of Pushwagner's largest and most complex works, Kings Cross, two days before the festival, no one would have been sad about them.
But; Challenge accepted!
One of the greatest technical challenges with the animations was its performance. Pushwagner was fond of drawing an incredible number of repetitive characters, and he has obviously spent a lot of time, especially in the Kings Cross and Manhattan artworks. But it's something completely different to animate this at 30 frames per second. At the same time, it was this infinite and overwhelming repetition that was some of the most important designers would capture in Pushwagner's style.
The solution was to use the parallelism of modern video cards. In the demanding animations, the movements were written in Vertex Shaders, as small programs where each figure, completely independent, calculates its own location and orientation as a function of a common time. The user's drawings are continuously loaded into the video card's ultra-fast memory, and all essential data is transmitted there for use as soon as possible. Then the performance was increased even more by reducing the details that didn't seem so good. Polygons out of sight were removed and those far away from the camera have a lower degree of detail.
_The Result
Technology
The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation.
We saw no need of the impulse — for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself; — we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal.
Design
- Oslo Innovation Week
The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation.
We saw no need of the impulse — for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself; — we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal.
Credits
Audun Stien
Ben Høst
Mira Feiring
Jonatan Austigard
Joakim Tysseng
Holger Ludvigsen
Morten Torgersen
Beate Ingebretson
Hans Christian Øren
Nina Inberg
Anders Christensen