HBO
Promo
Art & Design
A month of television,
built by hand on a tabletop.
This is HBO Canada's monthly "what's on" promo — and almost nothing in it is a render. Real ink blooms through water, real leaves fall past glass, real surgical instruments and hand-lettered type carry the titles. Each shot is a tiny physical world, built and lit on set, then cut to a single premium spot.
Skip the render. Make it real.
Most channel promos lean on motion graphics. For HBO the brief pushed the other way — toward something you could almost touch. So the whole package was designed to be shot practically: props sourced and made, ink and water choreographed, type drawn by hand and captured in-camera. Tactility is what reads as prestige on screen — the tiny imperfections of real materials do what a clean keyframe never can.
If it looks handmade, it's because it was.
Everything you see, we built.
A plywood rig on sawhorses becomes a stage. Autumn leaves are dropped, take after take, through a glass tank so they drift the right way. Ink is dosed drop by drop; instruments are placed, nudged, relit. As designer and prop artist I was hands-on across the shoot — making the objects, dressing each set-up, and dialing the timing until the frame felt effortless. The mess off-camera is the whole point of what lands on it.
This month, on HBO.
Cut together, the physical set-ups collapse into one calm, confident spot: ink resolves into a title, a scalpel and thread hint at the drama ahead, leaves settle into the sign-off. Handmade all the way through — and it wears that on screen.
