Uncharted Limbo

Never before has an agency trusted us with a vision so wild, ambitious and seemingly impossible! The result? "Spreadbeats: The First Music Video Coded & Experienced Entirely in a Spreadsheet" just won 9 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity awards, including the Grand Prix in Digital Craft!

Thanks for the great words Frédéric De Vries ✍🏻 🦾! It's easily the most ambitious and technically complicated project of our studio to date, since **everything** from the video encoding algorithms to the timeline editor had to be coded from scratch! Not only we produced the content in collaboration with the great animators from Colossal, but we even built external tools to help us build in-Excel tools in order to author, organize, optimize and play back the full sequence, consisting of multiple overlaid techniques.

🤯👾 Our most ambitious project to date: A music video… in Excel ! 🤯👾 As a spectacularly surreal week comes to an end at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, it is with ceasless joy and gratiude that we get to say 'The Spreadbeats Family' took home the most (9) awards of the Festival: - 1 GRAND PRIX (Technological Achievement in Digital Craft) - 2 Gold (Motion Graphics Design & Animation, Mailing/Programmatic Mail) - 3 Silver (Craft in B2B, Consumer Services/Business to Business) - 3 Bronze (Data Visualisation, Innovative use of Content, Video/Moving Image) - AND a Titanium shortlist! The leaf shaped cherry on the cake was a Palme d'Or for Uncharted Limbo, for being the production company that obtained the most points for winning and shortlisted entries!!! It's all going to take a while to sink in. This project was a labour of love from start to finish and from everyone involved. Each creative contribution, concept sketch, line of VBA code, test animation, early morning zoom meeting, midday google meet, late night teams call, impromptu catch up, design mockup, surprise deadline, slack emoji, new deck, feature request, storyboard, feature request, mood board, feature request, bug fix, another bug fix and final bug fixes... culminated in something no-one saw coming. We made a music video, coded , delivered and experienced entirely in an Excel spreadsheet, no fakery! And the "we" in question, is the trailblazing creative team at FCB New York, the animation gurus at Colossal (Diogo Gameiro, Daniel Maia, Pamela Almeida Tameem Sankari & the unequivocally brave client team Spotify Advertising. Particularly special thanks goes to: Roxane Schneider & Pieter Claeys the rockstar duo that willed this idea into existence, Margot Meyerhoff who moved mountains on a daily basis to keep the wheels turning, Collosal who animated the unanimatable and Danilo Boer who asked for the impossible, knowing fullwell it could be done. Thank you all for making this project what it is. Any new crazy, impossible ideas for next year? Spotify Advertsing: Grace Kao Richard Frankel Jessica Levinsohn FCB: Michael Aimette John Bleeden Tara Graff Jessie Gwilt Nick Williams Victoria Rocha gary resch Sachin Arora Animation Team (Colossal): Diogo Gameiro Daniel Maia Pamela Almeida Tameem Sankari and our very own: Chris Waters George Adamopoulos Eleana Polychronaki Philip Pappas

We couldn’t be more excited for what happened last weekend at Société des arts technologiques [SAT] ! Our short film “Protist Rhapsody” won the “Prix Trame Sonore - Best Sound Driven Work” award, thanks to the incredible work by composer Elias Aronidis and the Dolby mixing expertise of Philip Marinelis. Soon to a full dome near you! A big warm thanks to Jenny Thibault , Mourad Bennacer, Imane Hammar and the rest of the SAT team for welcoming us to the full-dome family and fostering such an open and vibrant environment. Congratulations to the amazing winners of the other prizes: Prix Œuvre narrative / Best Narrative work Award : FEED - IMUU https://imuu.io/ ▪️ Prix d’originalité / Originality award : Ignite! - Lynn Tomlinson ▪️ Prix d’innovation / Innovation Award : Dancing with the Dead Animals -Maarten Isaäk de Heer ▪️ Special mention from the jury: Inner Island - Sergey Prokofyev ▪️ Excellence Award: Dancing with the Dead Animals - Maarten Isaäk de Heer ▪️ Audience Award / Audience Award: Dream - Ari Dykier

Just finished the first R&D week of our new collaboration with choreographer Jack Philp! Real-time interactive visuals projected on the magnificent dome of the Planetarium Hamburg!

Congratulations to our co-founder for her new teaching position!

We are very excited to present "PROTIST RHAPSODY", an immersive experimental computer animation, uniquely envisioned for the full-dome theater. . . We invite you to peek into a world where the boundary between the digital and the organic dissolves, and observe the spectacular birth of a mysterious entity, inspired by Physarum Polycephalum. . . In this digital microcosm you follow the entity's quest to find balance amid the forces of its inner self and those of its environment, echoing the timeless dance of adaptation and individuality. . . Official Selection for SAT dome fest 2024, 21-24 March. It will premiere on the Satosphere ! Société des arts technologiques [SAT] . . Original score composed by the incredible Elias Aronidis. . . #madewithunity #computationalbiology #computationaldesign #realtimerendering

We are travelling to Stuttgart this weekend for our first official meeting with the amazing team at HLRS - High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, our main mentor during the S+T+ARTS Air residency. We've been busy doing a lot of reading and testing in the past month and we are very much looking forward to discussing with the team our initial strategies and draft approaches regarding both hardware and software for this ambitious project. Here we go! https://lnkd.in/ecfc35pq

Privileged to be among such a great group of artists ! The first month of discussions has already uncovered potential collaborations in the fields of generative music and AI-augmented choreography 🤯

Just us ! 2024 has already promised us a bunch of adventures to completely uncharted territories! Stay posted for updates on our most consequential year so far. Our team wishes you a deeply meaningful year !