PRINT came to us wanting a film for their 2025 awards competition celebrating the wild, untamed power of creativity. They already had a metaphor in mind, where the "seed" of an idea takes over a blank canvas and keeps growing until the result is something you couldn't have pictured at the start. They specifically wanted to express this story through organic growth and blooming 3D motion.

We took that "untamed" idea a step further and built our entire creative process around it. In this film, the environment is a chain of generative systems in Houdini that feed into one another, creating a bit of a simulated ecosystem. Sculptural rock formations are generated first and lay the groundwork. A branching vine structure grows across that terrain, and wherever the vines reach, they trigger flowers to bloom. The flowers are procedural as well, each one assembling itself through skeletal animation and cloth simulation.

Every system in that chain has randomness at its core (albeit with a fair bit of art direction), so changing a single seed value at the beginning would have produced an entirely different film. With the environment growing on its own terms, we approached the film almost like a documentary, animating cameras by hand through the scene to capture the moments that were exciting to look at.

I built the whole thing in Houdini, from the first tools to the final shots, using procedural networks and VEX scripting. Throughout the process I worked closely with Justin Colt, my creative director at The Collected Works and the editor on this project, to define the art direction and camera work.

We also worked together on the 2D campaign, developing a type system to sit alongside the organic visuals and a set of stills that use individual tools from the project, such as the flower blooms, in isolation.