I spent most of 2026 working on a major project for the launch of Spectacles — Snapchat’s futuristic augmented reality glasses. The campaign featured a pop-up exhibition at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles, showcasing the new product with a massive, eye-catching lens as the centerpiece. As part of the 3D & Motion Team, I explored and developed various visual styles, collaborating closely with Closer's interior design unit. Alongside delivering weekly visualizations and short motion clips, my core focus was experimenting with a wide range of animations, gradients, and shaders. At one point, I also directed the animatic for a show that was unfortunately later scrapped. That said, please find a selection of my R&D work below.
Title: "SPECS"
Role: 3D Designer
Production: Closer Ltd, London
Creative Direction: Adam Aftanas, Marie Larsen
Team (CGI / Motion): Andrew Cunningham, Thomas Lowles, Bruno Inhudes, Kwan Chow
Type: Client Work
Client: Snap Inc.
Year: 2026
Look & Feel of the visualisations
This was the look of the visualisations along with some camera angles that we presented to the client. There were several changes on the exhibition stand over time, so this evolved week by week. This clean white look for the environment was what we went with in the end - but the orb shaders still changed a lot.
Design & Development Exhibition
Early Explorations for the Look of the Orb. As well as a Timelapse to simulate the behaviour in changing light conditions.
Various ways of shading the people - we went with a very simple smooth white in the end.
Besides the main exhibition - there´s also a pop up store. At one point I created a foil shader to explore how this could look.
Gradient RND
These were some early Styleframes to get into the work on the gradients.
Motion Gradients - the brief was to come up with interesting ways of moving gradients using "realistic" refraction of light. It was an ongoing exploration I really enjoyed! I mainly used Houdini with Karma and Redshift as renderers for these. Here´s a small selection.