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Character design · BMW
Designing a dance partner for one
How an eight-armed dancer turned an engineering proposition into a character people could understand.
How an eight-armed dancer turned an engineering proposition into a character people could understand.
The brief from agency Jung von Matt Hamburg was elegantly mad: design a fully CG octopus that dances a waltz, as a metaphor for BMW's new Heart of Joy central control unit. The trickiest part of my work on Okto's character design was figuring out how to make him feel like he's dancing with someone, when he's completely alone. The key was finding how pairs of arms could echo each other, leading and following within the same body.
Editorial direction
How character can make a piece of invisible technology emotionally legible.
- Finding leading and following gestures in one body
- The modern advertising mascot
- When metaphor does more work than explanation
This is prototype scaffolding for the longer culture commentary.