Audi: Design & Branding

Credits & Description:

Name of Client: AUDI AG
Entrant: Creators
Country: Germany
Title of Entry: THE EVENT
Name Of Product: AUDI SUMMIT 2017
Production Company: Creators, Oettle Ferber Associates, TFN , FOUR TO ONE Lighting Design, madhat , Designliga

Studio: Madhat
Creative Direction: Mikko Weihrauch
Project Coordination/Head of Content: Thomas Flechel
Artists: Thomas Flechel, Martin Pajak, Dino Muhic, Jochen Braun, Daniel Schulz, Deborah Arp, Daniel Barth, Stefan Laschet, Stephan Guschke
Music: Marco Lehmann
Technical Director: Thomas Lutz & Oliver Kuhlmann
Madhat asked me to join their team for the 2017 Audi Summit where the new Audi A8 was supposed to be presented on a KUKA robotic arm. On top of that, a 42 meter wide and 7.5 meter tall LED wall had to be animated for the part which was about 6 minutes long.
That part also included a live projection onto the car from different perspectives enveloping it completely in animated content. Therefore, a customized software was written by the amazing programmers @Madhat to calculate the correct projection for each projector.
My parts included about a month of R'n'D with different particle, shading and animation setups and two more months of animation and rendering.We were given an amazingly huge amount of creative freedom during the layout- & styleframing-phase that resulted in a mixture of the artists’ individual styles in the final show.
My parts of the show were the quattro sequence depicting the falling onto the 'cloth', styleframing the quattro landscape with the silver pistons, the electrifying-sequence as well as the sensors sequence afterwards, the particle explosion, the digital city and the tunnel sequence right before the finale.
We also had to set up a pipeline for the robotic arm movements so the artists were able to animate it as they like while still maintaining a physically possible arm movement.
My part in the project took about 3 months.

Synopsis:
On 11 July 2017, Audi invited around 2,000 guests to the first Audi Summit on the exhibition grounds in Barcelona to present pioneering solutions for the urban mobility of tomorrow. As part of the show, not only the new Audi A8 was unveiled, but also the newly developed technology Audi AI demonstrated, which equips the vehicle of the future with artificial intelligence. The focus of the event was therefore the topics and technologies that should underline the car manufacturer's strategic lead in terms of digitization, sustainability and urbanization. The guests from the fields of media, finance, trade and associations first benefited from a one-hour brand staging - implemented logistically by the Düsseldorf agency STAGG & FRIENDS, in which 70 automobiles were shown, which were integrated into a media scene of the creative agency CREATORS. A real A8 moved with the help of a robot arm to match the scene and kept merging with the pictures on the 50 meter long LED screens. After the show, visitors to the adjacent section of the exhibition hall finally had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of a big city and experience concepts, exhibits and lectures on mobility and artificial intelligence as well as the smart factory of the future.