Style & Inspiration
is taken from a spa area (including a jacuzzi!) used exclusivly by members of the Stasi, the secret police of GDR. Additional mosaic inspiration comes from various sovyet era public buildings while lettering is derived from "Konsum" signs, which was the state-run supermarket chain supplying the basic everyday needs for eastern germans.
Vector to Mosaic
Vector illustrations were provided by Megaherz, we turned into a 3d mosaic to be used on our interior set for the camera push-back.
adding extra steps for an alternative path
as an alternative route to the camera push-back we proposed an idea of having the mosaic on the sides of steps or collums and having the KLEO typography as a neon type on the perpendicular faces of those collums. This would have made a text reveal through a camera pan possible. Which would have been a nice effect for sure but the straight camera push just worked better with the cameras tonality in the rest of the series.
the mosaic machine
in order to cater for changes and keep everything as art directable as possible the mosaic creation was done by an automated Houdini setup that brought in the Adobe Illustrator illustrations and turned it into a geometry mosaic. We decided to go for a full geo creation for the mosaic to be able to create close up shots, even though no close up shots were used in the final opener. But the machine would have been able to deliver should an alternative route be chosen.
Credits
Client: Netflix
KLEO created by: Hanno Hackfort, Richard Kropf, Bob Konrad
for Aixsponza:
Producer: Julian Fischer
Project Lead: Matthias Zabiegly
3d Artists: Stephan Helbing, Denis Jagodic