Mystic materials

Denmark – Ikea’s latest advert features abstract digital animations as a teaser for its forthcoming collaboration with design studio Hay.

• Three Danish studios Kühl & Solvstrom, Nikextension and Barkas worked together to create the piece
• In lieu of being able to show real products, the film aims to highlight the sort of materials that will be in the retailer’s forthcoming furniture collection

The film features a series of increasingly surreal set pieces performed in an empty apartment. In one scene a wooden, vine-like structure bursts through the parquet floor, while in another a bolt of material floats spectrally in the centre of a room. The audio track is punctuated by ASMR-like environmental sounds, such as a glass ball reverberating as it rolls across the floor.

The piece is designed to show some of the materials used in a forthcoming collaboration between Ikea and Hay, building interest for the 2017 launch of the furniture collection despite the fact that none of the designs have yet been released.

‘The main dogma was that we couldn’t show any products, so we decided to produce the entire film with the use of 3D animation and photorealist rendering techniques. It had to be surreal and mysterious, and leave the viewer with a feeling of ‘what did I just watch?’ Kühl & Solvstrom designer and animator Morten Kühl Christensen told It’s Nice That.