UNIQLO "Wonderqube"

UNIQLO, Japan’s leading clothing retail chain, contracted Dentsu America to launch its national “Wonderqube” campaign. Having seen our graphics for MTV’s “The Seven”, Dentsu America contacted Garbanzo to produce a broadcast worthy :30 motion graphics animation. The catch? They needed it in 6 days.

UNIQLO’s look is minimal, clean, a bit playful, and beautifully Japanese (see UNIQLO “Grid”). The concept was to give away 100 mystery prizes to winners that entered on the uniqlo.com website. But their look was entirely 2D; no one had ever seen UNIQLO’s designs in 3D. Utilizing Cinema 4D and After Effects, Garbanzo collaborated closely with Dentsu to realize this vision.

The project had quite a few conceptual iterations, from stacks of boxes piling themselves on top of one another, to an entire planet of boxes swarming together, rotating, and flipping open. The client and agency decided to take inspiration from Alamo, also known as “The Astor Place Cube”, located just blocks away near Cooper Union in NYC. With Dentsu’s direction, the Garbanzo team created a large formation of boxes assembling and opening to show the various prizes – all minimally designed, but with a subtle playfulness.

Process

Cubes? Yeah, it might seem simple, but in fact there is a delicate dance between these hundreds of individually mapped cubes being animated using particle systems. Additionally, we wanted to make the lighting reminiscent of what you might see in a UNIQLO store with a touch of a high-fashion cyclorama. The result is a clean minimalist look.