Angelina is a 3D Designer and Art Director. Her experience in creating brilliant bold and joyful animations and stills to tell brilliant, engaging stories has seen her create narratives for Nike, Beats by Dre and Bulgari. Angelina's design are playful and nostalgic, eliciting childhood memories. We spoke to her about her style, influences and working in 3D.
Light-hearted, eclectic and naive. I like to make objects tell a story and build associations through their look, behaviour or placement. Those associations often link to things, images and ideas from childhood and create a bit of a bittersweet nostalgic feeling. It’s also interesting to play with different layers of meanings and have one object hint on different things and offer more than one way to interpret it for the viewer.
‘I spy’ book series. It’s books with very detailed and busy photographs of different sets of objects built from toys, food and everyday objects. Each set has a theme and tells a little story and mimics reality in a playful way. Since I saw them as a child, I was absolutely fascinated by how those photos made you observe the mundane objects in a different light and discover what stories they have to tell. This is something I’m now trying to do in my work, gathering inspiration from mundane situations or childhood memories and reworking them into little narratives.
For me the most exciting thing about working in 3D is how easy it is to create an entire story from absolute nothing. You can single-handedly model, build, direct and ‘film’ a short movie and literally make it anything you want because all the tools are there for it. Collaborative nature and the sense of community is another thing I adore. Even if you work entirely on your own, you can use tutorials, materials, models, scans, setups built by other people and it creates this brew of looks and ideas that influence one another and make ideas evolve.
My ongoing collaboration with Avgvst jewellery is definitely the project that I cherish the most. We are very aligned creatively and take our inspiration from similar territories, trying to play with the viewer and hide associations and cultural references in every piece we create. But most importantly for me, Avgvst is a brand that truly stands for ideas of freedom, peace and equality and I love being able to communicate those ideas to the large audience of their customers in a very gentle, playful and aesthetically pleasing way.
Overall I’d say that I am very conservative in my practice and rarely change the way I work when new tools come out. My colleagues laugh at me that I’m always the latest to update my software. I have always been more interested in developing the ideas and the look rather than in technical solutions, so new tools rarely excite me unless they introduce a new style that was unachievable before. For example when RunwayMl came out it became really easy to play with the aesthetics of machine learning and I created a set of concert visuals for Vladimir Martynov & Moa Pillar based on that aesthetic.
