Behind the Scenes at OFFF Barcelona 2026 Creating the colorful title sequence that left crowds mesmerized.

Creative Director PJ Richardson, 3D Motion Designer Alex Liou, and Visual Artist and Art Director Josh Pierce came together to create the event’s most lively opening titles to date. Laundry Studios is a motion design, animation, and production studio with locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The award-winning creative studio has worked with brands like Apple, Nike, Google, Lego, Cola-Cola, and more to create unique motion content. 

We caught up with Richardson for a behind-the-scenes look at how the team pulled off the impressive 55 titles that welcomed the creative community.

Richardson: I’ve been a die-hard OFFF fan, attendee, and, over the last few years, speaker at OFFF across all their conferences. I just love the sense of community, creative vibe, and being a part of it all. To do my best to give back and contribute, I approached OFFF Founder Pep Salazar in late 2025 to see if we could do the titles. We thought it was going to be a 2–3-minute title sequence on stage at the conference in Barcelona, but after we started, we learned that for the first time it would be a large projection mapping on the side of the Disseny Hub, the design museum in Barcelona where OFFF takes place every year.

In addition, Uncommon Creative Studio designed the identity for the conference. They essentially collected the saliva of each OFFF attendee through a series of previous meet ups worldwide and let the samples grow mold to form mold art. The idea was to have a visual representation of each of us individually coming together in a beautiful organic way, exactly how we all experience OFFF. Our intention was to make the titles visually grow out of this to tie everything together.

Richardson: There were 55+ titles, and we had about 45 days of production, which didn’t allow us much time for R&D. Instead, we embraced the concept of what our shared community has in common as creatives - the process. Inspired by my creative hero and mentor that I never got to meet, Virgil Abloh, we embraced a very postmodern approach, where the process became the visual art. I knew that the titles should reflect the shared creative journey involving the emotions, experiments, failures, and learnings of the creative process.

We divided the titles into three chapters to reflect this: anticipation/excitement, curiosity/experimentation, and the joy of getting to the beautiful end place. Within each were very specific emotions visually: the excitement and abstraction of an idea taking form, the process of experimentation, and the therapeutic feeling of reaching the end and happy place.

To help get everything done in time, I called two of my good friends, Alex Liou and Josh Pierce. Alex played with the curiosity chapter as a master Houdini experimenter, Josh brought to life the end destination section as a happy place through his signature 3D landscapes, and I took on the first chapter and comp. As we progressed, we experimented with each section and selected the strongest iterations that matched each feeling.

What tied it all together was working with Maxon Cinema 4D and Redshift. I’ve worked with many tools, new and old, but the simplicity of Cinema 4D and Redshift remain my go-to choices for their speed and stability. At Laundry, we use Cinema 4D and Redshift for 85% of our 3D work, from advertising campaigns, mograph and branding, to world building, and character work. We’ve heavily leaned on them for product and out-of-home work for the biggest brands and screens in the world like Nike, Sphere, and Apple. It just works.

Richardson: Redshift saved us on rendering as it always does. We know it well and we were able to achieve the bold color vibrancy and graphic style which played into our shared aesthetic really well. The procedural nature of some of Redshift’s noise modes helped us with our more organic materials to create more natural-looking textures as well as ones we could animate on loops and easily adjust the speeds procedurally.

Richardson: As we got into it, we learned we could use audio even as it was projection mapped outside. We approached John Black and the Cypher Sound team in Toronto. The brief was similar to the one we set for ourselves about embracing the process, using the freedom to do what clients rarely let us do. They built the soundscape of around 60 layers of sound to build the score to the titles.

Richardson: This was by far the hardest part. We had a 2D template and a 3D scan of the building, but we quickly ran into two challenges. First, building a 3D landscape actually looked warped, even if accurate on the wall. Second, the center of the 3D comp wasn’t the same center point viewers would see on screen because of the oblong shape of the building. So, we had to basically build our scenes about 35% wider than what you would see to get a true center point. Additionally, the output was more than 8k at 50 FPS, which added a huge render consideration to our pipeline. That’s why we used the AI tool Topaz to upscale the project from the 4k, 25 FPS format we originally worked in. 

Richardson: At the moment, usage varies. Laundry currently uses AI heavily as part of our workflow from simple technical efficiencies, all the way up to entire AI productions. We use it for storyboards, style exploration, photography, video, and CGI-like animation. That said, for us, it remains a tool we use creatively only when it makes sense for our deliberate, intentional vision and taste we come up with first. In most instances, we still don't use it at all because we don’t gain much from it. 

In terms of how we see ourselves using AI going forward, as a tool, it's not going anywhere and will only get technically better, more diverse, and more powerful. My gut says the way we use it will be twofold. Technically, it will continue to simplify complex tools, making them easier to use. This allows us to do a ton of powerful creative tasks, instead of being limited to just a few, which is why our studio as well as many creatives use it increasingly. I think we will all veer away from AI stylistically, for example when it comes to generative AI art. Right now, it feels a bit like when Photoshop filters came out; there is incredible polish, but this overcooks the visual style. Since it is easy to make, which usually means there is more of it out there, it often becomes less coveted by artists and clients alike. We are already seeing this and often avoid “AI looks,” particularly because, even before AI, we were constantly in pursuit of what creates the most emotional connection over glossy polish.

Richardson: The titles was one of the most satisfying and exhausting projects emotionally I’ve worked on. The size and the pressure of making something I loved for my peers who I truly respect was a huge weight. Next for me has been to relax and take in and find new ways of being creative. At Laundry we have been toying a lot with AI, mainly from the challenge of how to make emotional work with it. I’ve been excited about typography again too.

Key Takeaways

• PJ Richardson and his team created a massive projection mapping title sequence consisting of 55 titles spanning 10 minutes for OFFF Barcelona 2026.

• They relied on Cinema 4D and Redshift’s procedural workflows to complete the project which immersed crowds and set the vibe for the entire event.