Company
Timeline
Role
The Idea
"Sammeln" began as a personal project between Kevin Jaeger and me — a way to challenge ourselves, improve our technique and find a shared style without a client or a brief in the room. Following our common interests, we landed on the act of collecting itself as the theme, and then kept asking the obvious-but-hard questions: what even is collecting? What makes something worth keeping? Why do we feel the urge to gather at all? The film became our attempt to answer those questions visually rather than verbally — a study disguised as an art piece.
The Concept
We have discovered that gathering is by no means a human invention. It runs through the entire natural world—animals gathering food, building nests with astonishing precision, and organizing their world. Gathering is a living being’s fundamental interaction with its environment: organizing, filtering, and sorting what surrounds it. This new perspective became the backbone of the film—gathering not as consumer behavior or hoarding, but as something instinctive, almost beautiful, shared by all species.
The Value of Things
Another recurring theme in “Sammeln” is value and how elusive it is. What is valuable to one person means nothing to another. We came to the conclusion that the value of an object does not lie in the object itself—it lies in the appreciation for it, in the process of acquiring it, in the care with which it is curated, and in the way it is ultimately presented. That is the alchemy of collecting: with enough attention and the right presentation, even a simple stick becomes a work of art. Most of the film revolves around proving exactly that.
The Film
The result is a short animated art film — abstract, serene, intended to be felt rather than understood. Instead of narrating the idea, we let it speak through the images: collected, sorted, and highlighted objects, nature, and instinct, rendered in CGI. It is the most purely artistic project either of us has ever undertaken, and the one that leaves the most room to breathe.
The new Ikigai Labs website launched as an immersive and visually striking platform, successfully capturing the spirit of experimentation. Interactive previews, animated case studies, and a modular layout allowed the studio to showcase its diverse portfolio dynamically. Users could explore projects intuitively, and the site’s responsiveness ensured smooth experiences across devices. Feedback from the client highlighted how effectively the platform communicated their identity, helping attract collaborations with forward-thinking brands and startups. The project positioned Ikigai Labs as a leader in experimental design and interactive innovation, while giving them a scalable, adaptable digital home for future projects.
Clay states, work-in-progress renders, the model before it became an image. Seeing the geometry raw is part of the story: it shows how much of the final result comes from lighting and surfacing work, and how the shape was pushed and corrected over many passes until every proportion landed.
Around the car sit the component studies — parts pulled out and treated as objects in their own right. The tyres became their own experiment: tread and rubber sculpted and rendered as near-abstract forms, labelled "Test 01", pushed until they read less like a car part and more like a black material study. It's the kind of detail nobody asks for, and exactly the kind of detail the whole project is built on.
Collaboration
“Sammeln” was created through close collaboration—Kevin Jaeger and I shared the concept, art direction, and 3D animation rather than dividing up the tasks. This close collaboration with another artist was an essential part of the project: it brought our techniques and styles to a level that neither of us could have achieved alone. The film is as much about this creative exchange as it is about its subject matter.
Craft & Process
Behind the calm of the finished film lies the usual, unglamorous groundwork—the making-of feature shows the creative process, the various drafts, and the technical work required to transform an abstract idea about collecting into moving images. The further development of our craft was an explicit goal of the project, not a side effect, and it was precisely in this process that the bulk of that development actually took place.
The new Ikigai Labs website launched as an immersive and visually striking platform, successfully capturing the spirit of experimentation. Interactive previews, animated case studies, and a modular layout allowed the studio to showcase its diverse portfolio dynamically. Users could explore projects intuitively, and the site’s responsiveness ensured smooth experiences across devices. Feedback from the client highlighted how effectively the platform communicated their identity, helping attract collaborations with forward-thinking brands and startups. The project positioned Ikigai Labs as a leader in experimental design and interactive innovation, while giving them a scalable, adaptable digital home for future projects.
Recognition
“Sammeln” resonated far beyond the scope of a personal project. It was featured by Stash Media — a compilation of some of the best motion and animation work from around the world — and went on to become one of the most-viewed pieces in my portfolio. For a film that was created without a commission or a client, but simply to explore an idea and advance our craftsmanship, this reach was the clearest sign that the idea worked out.
