We designed various animated maps to visualize the evolution of Burning Man from a small underground gathering into a massive temporary desert city. Time-lapse-style animations and overhead views convey the festival’s explosive growth over time and give the viewer their bearings in the Nevada desert.
From underground ritual to global phenomenon, The Man Will Burn captures the evolution of Burning Man from a renegade bonfire on a San Francisco beach into an 80,000-person experiment in art, identity, and radical self-expression. This HBO series premiered at Tribeca. We brought this story to life through a design package that echoes the scale, energy, and mythology of the movement itself.
Expertise
- Creative Direction
- 2D Animation
- 3D Animation
- Motion Design
- VFX
Plotting the Playa
Afterburn!
The Man Will Burn features a rich history of Burning Man captured in decades of first-hand video footage. We created an archival video carrier that cohesively presents mixed formats of source media while keeping the look and feel of the graphics system. We equipped the editorial team with a custom After Effects toolkit system called Afterburn. This was a one-click tool to ingest, reformat, and dress up any size of source media
Desert to Digital
From social media posts to getting updates via web calls or live streams, illustrating how burners communicated through various digital platforms was crucial to understanding key plot points in the series.
VFX
If you didn’t notice our visual effects, then we did our job well. Screen replacements provided story clarity, but needed to be seamlessly integrated to avoid distracting the viewer from the scene. Good VFX should be harder to find than an unlit campsite in a dust storm.