TELUS Werry Wall

The recently renovated Len Werry building at the intersection of 1st Street and 7th Avenue SW has played an integral role in Calgary’s history over the past 100 years. We were approached by TELUS Studio to pitch a series of animation ideas for an LED screen that spans the ground level, street-facing facade of the Werry building.

The creative brief was that the ideas either had to be artistic in nature (relating to the community and / or to the city of Calgary) or about technology (about TELUS as a company and what it does). The technical brief was that the artwork had to be sized to fit an extremely long format (15,840px X 1080px). Also, the content had to work up close (adjacent to the people walking by), as well as from across the street. The LED screen faces a busy intersection and a prominent downtown CTrain (metro) station.

CREDITS

Design: Mateusz Napieralski
(Gust Of Wind Studio)
Direction and Animation:
Good Bad Habits

For the animated Calgary skyline, we worked with Mateusz Napieralski (aka Gust Of Wind Studio) who’s work we’ve always been a huge fan of. Mateusz had lived in Calgary for a few years, so he was familiar with the city and it’s key landmarks. We decided to create a looping timelapse of an abstracted Calgary skyline - from morning to noon to evening to night. An ever-changing mosaic of Calgary’s most iconic buildings intertwined with little moments, situations that happen throughout the day. These moments are specific to the city of Calgary and to its residents.

In terms of the visual language, we explored a bold, graphic approach with expressive strokes and lines cutting into each other, forming a slightly abstracted, but still recognizable landscape filled with Calgary’s landmarks and characters that are embedded directly within the graphic world. To add depth to the overall composition, we incorporated shaded textures to the shapes were animated in a very interesting way to create an illusion of dimension within the mosaic.

Direction, Design and Animation: Good Bad Habits

For the Optical Fibres piece, we researched the science that this technology is based on, and came up with interesting and abstract ways to depict it. Our first set of explorations were a bit literal in the way that “packets” of information bounced around the walls of an imaginary fibre. After several rounds of tweaks and finessing, we arrived at a cleaner more sophisticated look.