Advertising

Brainfood was VPRO’s brand campaign, built around the digital 3D painted sculptures I was making at that time, just before the world went properly bananas. Its advert promoting the channel ran on TV across the Netherlands in 2023, introducing VPRO to a younger audience, and a follow up campaign ran in 2024. To go alongside it I made two idents. The campaign also appeared at IDFA and Dutch Design Week.

I’d started making ceramics and worked to get every texture as close to handmade as I could, so the 3D work feels tactile, like you could stroke it. 3D modelling, texturing and animation is quite a rigid, detail orientated craft, and I’d wanted it to be something looser and more immediate, like ceramics.

At Lowlands my 3D head was turned into a giant inflatable. I ran a face painting stall next to it, ‘Face the Chaos with a Face of Chaos’, painting festival goers with a load of messy, chaotic paint over their faces as a talisman to shield them from the forthcoming chaos. Matching like with like and hopefully neutralising it. If we can’t be categorised, boxed in and neatly identified, we’re more difficult to package up and sell on as our digital selves. I’m pretty sure this works, but it’s difficult to tell beyond personal experience as there weren’t that many people wanting to walk round the festival with their faces covered in chaos.

Made in Cinema 4D and Redshift: art, modelling, texture and animation.