G8 × Red Collar

CGI · Animation · Lighting · Rendering

In September 2024, Red Collar hosted its own “UX Mutations” section at the G8 festival. We produced videos projected onto the walls, creating a digital environment around the audience. The visuals supported the section’s theme: how to preserve a distinctive user experience as interfaces become increasingly alike.

Red Collar’s brand art director Misha Boldyrev developed the concept. Its central idea was that the web and user experience must change, mutate and adapt to stay alive. Sea creatures fitted with valves, keys and other elements inhabited this imagined world alongside vivid graphic interludes, glitches and disrupted typography.

Three of us worked on the creatures: Kirill Alekseevsky, Max Ermolenko and me. Kirill and Max sourced models with existing animation, attached the additional elements and baked the results to Alembic. I then assembled the scenes in Cinema 4D and built the paths along which the creatures swam through the space. I developed the scene, materials, lighting and render setup, distributing rendering across my own computer, an office computer and a render farm. Misha Boldyrev created the graphic interludes and handled the music and sound. The team had no direct access to the venue before the event, so the space was reconstructed virtually during preparation. The venue’s technicians handled the final projection mapping.

Project: “UX Mutations” section, G8 festival, September 2024. Studio: Red Collar. Concept, graphic interludes, music and sound: Misha Boldyrev, Brand Art Director at Red Collar. Animated model sourcing, character modifications and Alembic preparation: Kirill Alekseevsky, Max Ermolenko. Scene assembly, movement paths, materials, lighting and rendering: Anton Maydurov. On-site projection mapping: venue technical team.