Explainer video style · Cubism

Cubism style explainer videos

See-through planes, faceted figures and stencilled letters. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Cubism style, scored and voiced, in about 15 minutes.

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What it looks like, and when to use it.

Overlapping see-through planes in ochre, brown and blue-grey, faces seen from two sides at once, stencilled letters and scraps of newspaper, like the Paris Cubist paintings of 1912. Everything is drawn in code, and the picture keeps shifting its point of view. It is clever and a little playful, and it is made for ideas that need to be seen from several angles at once.

Best for

Ideas with several points of view
Art, design and culture
Paris and modern history

Try a brief like

“How we see in three dimensions”
“Why witnesses remember the same event differently”
“How Paris changed art in 1912”

The art direction the director follows.

Every style is a full art direction, not a filter: its own palette, type, motion and music. This is the brief the director works from for Cubism.

Look: Analytic Cubism drawn in code, after Picasso and Braque around 1912. Space is broken into overlapping see-through planes in ochre, beige, brown and blue-grey, each graded light to dark; dotted and hatched patches, sandy dashes, thin straight lines running through everything, fake wood grain and cane weave, stencilled letters and newspaper scraps. Figures and objects are faceted into large triangles that spill past their outlines; faces show profile and front at once; contours are straight segments that overshoot their ends.
Motion: Shifting viewpoints. Window panes show the same view, each slightly offset and sliding; see-through triangles glide across; stencil letters hop and swap places on a 12fps step; a newspaper scrap trembles; facets on figures jitter slightly at 8fps and their shading flickers. Shots change as the frame shatters into shards that slide and reassemble into the next scene.
Music: Parisian café jazz: guitar, clarinet and brushed drums, angular and witty.
Type: Stencil slab letters with cut gaps (Alfa Slab-like) and a newspaper serif (Baskerville-like), in dark brown, placed as collage pieces.