Kia Morphia

The result of this partnership was Kia Morphia: a stunning anamorphic installation designed to bring Kia’s new logo and brand direction to life like never before. Exploring Kia’s new vision statement – ‘movement that inspires’ – the immersive installation would use three dimensional anamorphic animations on a huge LED cube to reimagine the possibilities of movement.

Because we were trying to tell the core story of Kia’s new brand through movement alone, the storyboard step in our process was crucial. We needed to map out each beat in our story to make sure each of our visualisations would be clear enough to communicate by themselves. If the storyboard couldn’t portray the story we were trying to tell, neither would the animation or editing.

The opening content piece in Kia Morphia is ‘Tennis in Motion’. Here, we gave a physical form to the movements of tennis great Rafael Nadal through dynamic particle systems. In a three-dimensional study of motion, Nadal appears to teleport around the digital canvas with speed and grace, trails of coloured particles amplifying the speed and precision of his movements.

The second Kia Morphia display, ‘EV Evolution’, was designed to explore the future of electric vehicles. While the goal of this piece was to show off Kia’s range of electric cars, we didn’t want to create a standard hi-vis vehicle render. We wanted to use particles and light to give audiences a sense of the vehicles and what they represent, so we decided to use an abstract wind tunnel visualisation – similar to what we created for the Macau Grand Prix Museum – to capture the energy and motion of electric vehicles.

The core idea behind ‘EV Evolution’ was to use light to reveal Kia’s electric vehicles. Within the dark wind tunnel environment, scanning rays of light and emissive particles work to reveal one part of the vehicle at a time. This helped to create an air of mystery throughout the visualisation, introducing hints of the future rather than revealing it all at once.

The final experience of Kia Morphia was titled ‘Brand Movement’, and was the ultimate demonstration of not only their new brand, but what our activation was capable of. The idea was to express Kia’s bold, premium new branding through the powerful forces of nature. Standing at the illusion point, audiences would feel as though the wave was crashing over them. This was the most impressive of our illusions, surprising and intriguing audiences as the power of nature – like Kia – burst forth from its enclosure.

Beyond the Australian Open, the Kia Morphia activation is set to tour both Sydney and Brisbane as an iconic brand experience. This success shows that the uncertainty and unpredictability that comes with a global pandemic calls not for an abandonment of experiential marketing, but an evolution of its potential. Indeed, focusing on strong brand storytelling and a compelling audience experience represents an opportunity for future-thinking brands to secure deeper engagement and interaction from ever-wider audiences.