CoMotion 2018

Every year, there is a competition for the CoMotion branding of the year. 4 of my friends and I decided to group up and design a logo together. We were humbled to have been chosen as the winners and get the honor of branding this year's event.  

Just like many other conferences, CoMotion always features a title sequence showcasing the companies in attendance. After winning the initial branding pitch, a team is chosen from student applicants to work on this as an extra curricular activity. Since my group won the pitch, I was honored to be in a leadership position as the Experiential Director. 

CoMotion 2018 Title Sequence

As the Experiential Director, my responsibilities aside from helping with the design aspect of the title sequence were to run the Virtual Reality student showcase and build a sculpture to go on stage with projections on top of it. This is the first year that we decided to feature either of those things, so it was all completely new to me. 

I chose to base the sculpture directly off of the cubes that were the collected elements in each of the six scenes in the title sequence. Every cube face has incredibly intricate designs which are totally possible in Cinema 4D, but not so much in the physical world.

I went through each design that we had made and created simplified yet still recognizable versions of them. I chose to make the cubes 1'x1' each, and disconnected from one another. This gave up the ability to stack them as we please and easily move them around. In the end we landed on the 4 stack and 2 stack next to one another on stage because we thought it looked best compositionally. 

+ The process of making the cubes was quite extensive. I started with prepping 36 different cube faces to be laser-cut out of wood, with etchings of where we then added laser-cut acrylic details. As you can imagine, I was then left with a giant puzzle to go through and figure out. 

+ The next step was glueing the cubes together. For each cube I glued together five of the faces and left one face removable. After the wood glue dried and the faces were securely attached I spray painted them with primer, let that dry, sanded it to get a smoother finish, and spray painted it again with white paint. 

+ After all the paint was dry, the cubes were ready for the acrylic details. Each piece of the acrylic was individually glued on in the etched out spaces. 

The plan from the beginning was to have projections on these cubes of the colors that match the cubes in the title sequence paired with some subtle movement. I was fortunate enough to have passionate team members that animated the cube faces for me. 

+ Above are the animations were projected onto the white cube faces.

The sculpture was on stage during the entirety of the event and brought our student lead conference up to a more professional level. If interested, check out the SCAD CoMotion website for information about this years event and updates for next year! 

+ If you are interested in watching any of the panel discussions from the event, click here.