Chinese New Year 2023

A fourth year of Louis Vuitton Chinese New Year watchfaces

For the fourth year running, I worked with Louis Vuitton on their Chinese New Year watchface collection, twelve animations for 2023. The animal designs I made in 2020 had run for three years, and the client wanted a new direction. Louis Vuitton looked to the animal-shaped lanterns carried at festivals, and we built twelve new animals around that idea.

Designing and animating the animals

I oversaw the creative direction and directed the collection, working with the artists to land the right design and textures for each animal. I was lucky to lead a talented team across the whole pipeline, from modeling and rigging to texturing and animation.

They designed the twelve characters in Photoshop, keeping one coherent style across the set, then built the 3D models with hand-painted textures in Adobe Substance Painter and rigged and animated them in Maya.

I drew up the storyboards and did all the shading, working out the lantern illumination where each animal glows as if lit from within, then handled the lighting, rendering and compositing.

Time display and LED integration

In each animation I placed the time between the animal and the background, for a sense of depth. Everything was exported in layers so the developers could slot the live time into that gap. The animations also drove the custom LED patterns around the watch display, with each animal's movement and color matched to its lights.