From Image to Impact How Redivider Studio transforms captivating visuals into buzzworthy campaigns.

Many artists strive to create impactful work that touches the hearts of audiences worldwide—the ad you remember forever, the commercial that evokes tears, the film you watch over and over again. For Redivider Studio, creating epic, memorable visuals for the themes they support is the heart of their mission.

Redivider Studio co-founder Tim Smit first gained attention from Hollywood in 2009 for his no-budget short film “What’s in the Box?”, which led to his debut feature film “Kill Switch.” Now, the new VFX studio he co-founded alongside VFX artists Matthijs Joor, Dieuwer Feldbrugge, and master Cinema 4D user Sohaib Bouaiss combines 15+ years of experience in VFX creation, project production, and directing.

The team pulls inspiration from the art of creativity, films like the original “Jurassic Park,” and nature, in an attempt to get the “wonder” back in the world. The name “Redivider” is a callback to singular cell life (re)dividing into the complex plethora of lifeforms. It also happens to be a palindrome, reflecting a clear and beautifully symmetric aesthetic.

We went behind the scenes to learn about Redivider Studio’s process for “OILympics,” their latest project in collaboration with Studio Birthplace for Greenpeace.

Smit: We formed Redivider Studio just a few months ago with a great team that takes on projects that have a message we want to support. Our work always has a “beyond reality” component. We often collaborate with Studio Birthplace, who are the creative minds behind a lot of brilliant campaigns like “Wear Wool, not Waste” and “Wear Wool, not Fuel” for Woolmark, as well as “TotalPollution,” “Respect the Amazon,” and of course “OILympics” for Greenpeace.

We mostly get inspiration from creative discussions, specific project challenges, projects/artists we admire, or simply from nature. For instance, we are currently working on a personal short film, “Axis Mundi,” that revolves around large creatures that fertilize our world. For that we turned to books, online images, stories we love about our world, and the designs nature gives us. We gather references for each project and get inspired by whatever crosses our paths in that research phase. We personally love projects that feel a bit experimental in concept or visual style. 

Smit: Studio Birthplace, our longtime creative partner, pitched the project to us after working together on “TotalPollution” for Greenpeace. This time the brief was slightly different. We wanted to see real people engaged in three winter Olympic games and fuse that with oil, since the games are sponsored by Eni. The mission was to draw inspiration from GoPro action camera footage of athletes and make the contrast between the white snow and ice and the black oil the central theme of the video. We first set parameters together to make sure that we could fit the project within budget and creative scope. Then we went and looked at a lot of reference footage and started to build the previsualization. This is where the real fun started! Here we played around with various ideas and camera options before settling on the final shots. Once everyone was happy, we got to work and started building the shots.

Smit: For scenes, we started with a previs and made sure that we could easily transition that into production shots. We did this by maintaining proper scale and placements relative to the camera and scene elements, even as early as the previs RnD stage. We set up lighting in Cinema 4D with some basic shaders on the geometry to establish a general mood. In the meantime, we worked in Autodesk 3ds Max using TyFlow and PhoenixFD to setup the FX. We then refined the shaders and finetuned the lighting in the scene.  

We created the athletes from stock models that we retrofitted with custom assets and textures to match them to the actual outfits worn at the winter Olympics. 

Lastly, we used Redshift to render huge amounts of particles, such as snow and ice as we wanted to keep these passes separate from the main Cinema 4D scene files. We brought all needed FX, like liquid and particles, back into Cinema 4D using alembics. This can be somewhat sluggish at times, but it is still effective enough for small productions such as this one.

Smit: This project helped us gain a deeper understanding of how to tell a compelling story in just a handful of shots, while maintaining high quality and energy.

Remarkably, we completed the entire project in only four weeks with a very small team of three artists—a feat made possible by our years of experience in Cinema 4D and Redshift. While we sometimes use other software packages, we absolutely love working in Cinema 4D for the extreme speed in which we can set up shots.

Bouaiss: In many of our projects and development cycles, it is very important to be able to explore and experiment with visual concepts and ideas. Often, rigid software pipelines and schedules don’t leave much room for this type of early experimentation. Although we use many different software tools, we really enjoy using Cinema 4D and Redshift whenever possible to quickly set up a scene and see which ideas work and which don’t. The speed at which we can set up shaders and lighting and rapidly edit setups allows us to explore many different avenues early on without getting bogged down by technical hurdles. We find this stage extremely important because it lets our imagination take the wheel and gives us a clear sense of the direction we want to develop our artistic vision.

Smit: We have a couple more awareness videos inbound that showcase human visual data in an impressive way, such as our earlier collaboration with Studio Birthplace on the Canopy “Pack4Good” campaign. We’re also working on a wildly cool commercial for a major international chips brand, alongside short films for friends, and are moving forward on our own in-house productions.

Key Takeaways 

• Redivider Studio is a new VFX studio that specializes in creating impactful VFX projects like their collaboration with Studio Birthplace on the “OILympics” campaign for Greenpeace.

• Cinema 4D was used for its speed in setting up shots and helped the studio explore and experiment with visual concepts and ideas.

• Redshift was useful for rendering a large amount of particles to create snow and ice.