Pitch Studios investigates the implications of digital tools on our ability to connect

“Hello, or g’day,” said Christie Morgan, the founder of Pitch Studios and the newly-launched Pitch Portal as she took to the Nicer Tuesdays stage. Hailing all the way from Melbourne in Australia, Pitch is a design studio which creates new forms of digital experiences, specialising in visual communication within the 3D space, particularly animation and interaction design.

Christie runs the studio alongside Chris Golden. While the pair sits at the helm alongside a small team, “I guess you could say we have a pretty collective mentality when it comes to the work we do,” she explained, “it’s very collaborative, we like to involve our extended creative community on projects.” But the idea is to always keep the core team small and agile, bringing in others as and when it’s needed.

While very much established as a design studio, this year, Pitch launched a new arm which aims to take a deeper look at the way humans communicate and connect with digital culture through films, interactive experiences and papers – “which are coming very soon,” she hinted. This new venture means the studio can undertake thorough research into the topics surrounding its work. Functioning like this – as a design studio and a creative lab – gives Pitch the flexibility to combine visual communication, strategy, and research and critical thinking for brands in an alternative format. It means it can do it all!

Through the studio’s work and research, the team keeps coming back to the same questions or ideas, Christie told us: “In this digital world, the possibilities are endless but we don’t really understand the implications of how we use these tools and how they might affect the way we understand and communicate with each other.”

These notions are then explored through a distinctive visual language which is applied across several projects. “A lot of the work explores the way humans connect using the internet and technology, how digital and physical are impacting our lives,” Christie stated. “We tend to look at this intersection of art and commerce and digital culture and attitudes and we also look deeper at digital and online communities.” And Pitch Studio’s aesthetics very much reflect this.

This then led nicely to a piece titled Virtual Gap Year produced in collaboration with IAM and shown at IAM Weekend ’19. A short animated film, the piece explores a global phenomenon: the gap year, an exploratory journey to “find yourself”. “So basically, they had this overarching theme and we plucked elements from that and created our own narrative from that,” Christie added. The film brings together several designers and artists from around the world, who all answered an open call. These were SmiskoAckerman, Lorna Pittaway, Twomuch Studio and Polina Zinziver and together they produced a piece imagining their own virtual travel destination, art directed by Pitch.