The identity for this electronic music festival makes 3D as analogue as possible

Pitch Music and Arts Festival, the contemporary electronic music festival in Australia, has received its 2023 look from Anatolik Belikov Studio – a motion design studio run by a small team of Ukrainian creatives. The project, which founder Anatolii Belikov describes as being more personal and experimental than commercial, uses CG to mimic practical cinema effects – think the kind of animation you might find in an old Sam Raimi horror or the practical effects from The Thing. The result is a 3D identity that simulates the look of reversed footage, time lapse and stop motion.

“Somehow practical effects, even if we know they aren't real, feel more real than photoreal CG,” Anatolii explains. The project for Pitch Music and Arts Festival provided the opportunity to flesh out ideas that Anatolii has had for years around digital work and its limitations. “I believe the blessing and the curse of the CG medium is that we can produce beautiful things almost without constraints that other mediums are restricted by.” For Anatolii, this means 3D has become very self-referential, so Anatolik Belikov Studio decided to look at analogue sources “such as cinema and photography” for the Pitch project.

This led the studio down a rabbit hole of cult cinema, from the cheesy – like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy – to the “disgusting”, like John Carpenter’s The Thing. “Or just some random 70s-80s cheap Italian horror from The Arrow (Netflix of B-movies)”, adds Anatolii. “I feel like despite the gruesome, graphic and sometimes clunky aesthetic of this genre and that era – all these pieces have such a powerful stamp of sincerity and craftsmanship.”

Time lapse is one technique the studio decided to imitate. “It's such a well-known trope in CG to simulate all these growing plants, trees and flowers,” the founder explains. But in real life, Anatolii points out, you can only capture plants growing through a time lapse video. So the studio manually animated a tree, complete with shaking and camera exposure changes, to suggest this technique.

Though Anatolii’s references are pure B-movie, the final design is altogether different. The studio swapped out more gruesome aspects of their references with “warming, bright and alive feelings that Pitch as a festival might bring”. Objects related to Pitch’s branding, such as a carabiner, recyclable can and fauna appear in motion alongside softer forms, with type design delivered by Pitch Festival’s Georgia Treloar. These objects often represent core ideas of the festival, like camping and being surrounded by “local nature”, says Anatolii.