PromaxBDA
Opening
Role: Art & Design
An awards show that
opens in light and shadow.
PromaxBDA honours the best in entertainment marketing — so its opening film had to earn the room. The idea was shadow theatre: no CG, just real bodies, costumes and creatures thrown as silhouettes onto backlit scrims. Every frame is a shape cast by a physical thing, in-camera, on set.
Everything is a silhouette.
Rather than animate an opener, we lit one. The whole sequence was designed around cast shadows — a figure pressed to a glowing surface, a hand reaching, an animal crossing the light. Working across art and design for agency Favorite Color, I helped shape the visual language and the objects that made it: what gets silhouetted, how it's lit, and how each shape reads the instant it hits the screen.
Give a real object a light, and it performs.
Built on backlit tables.
A blacked-out stage, a green screen, and a set of lightboxes people could lie across to cast their shadows from behind. Costumes were made and worn — including a full tiger suit — and a live gecko was brought in to throw its own unmistakable silhouette. Take after take, ordinary things became graphic shapes: the craft is almost entirely off-camera, in the rigging and the timing.
Lights down. Roll.
Edited together, the silhouettes flow into a single graphic, cinematic opener — human, a little uncanny, and unmistakably made by hand. Exactly the note to set an awards night on.
