Givenchy’s CG Promo for an Avant-Garde Shoe TA\VO Studio on how Redshift and Cinema 4D gave an urban sneaker promo a futuristic edge.

When Givenchy Paris needed an elegant promo to launch its innovative urban sneaker, TK-360, the luxury brand tapped Madrid-based TA\VO Studio to create the CG film.

Known for emphasizing iconic visuals and details in materials and textures, TA\VO Studio attracts clients across fashion, sports, technology, and luxury. Recently, the team has been busy creating product promos for clients like Stag’s Leap winery and luxury bag makers Loewe or Delvaux, as well as still and live organic wallpapers for Vivo, Oppo and OnePlus.

For this project, TA\VO collaborated with Givenchy’s Creative Director Matthew M. Williams, TA\VO used Cinema 4D, X-Particles and Redshift to create an ultra-sophisticated film that imagines the sculpted, single-piece sneaker as an artistic object produced by future technology.

Givenchy Paris reached out to TA\VO, asking for a video promo in keeping with William’s passion for avant-garde streetwear, says TA\VO Founder and Creative Director Tavo Ponce “We were asked to show the sneaker being created in an imaginary future, in an environment that reflected shoemaking technology far in advance of today.”

The heart of the brief was to show the making of the unique knitted sole, and TA\VO conceptualized and produced the campaign hand in hand with Williams and his team. Though initial conversations circled around robots in an industrial factory setting, the concept eventually shifted toward more of a feeling of iconic simplicity. So Ponce convinced Givenchy’s team to keep it clean and focused on just one futuristic robot knitting a single shoe.

While Ponce was conceptualizing and storyboarding the visual narrative, the rest of the team looked at hundreds of robot references and made tests to bring the concept together, says Executive Producer Beatriz Romero. Once the storyboard and style frames were approved, the team used Cinema 4D for the previz animatic and prepared for the final build.

Workflow was split across modeling the robotic technology, creating the sole, animating the weaving process and adding the final hyper-real look. “We started by taking a reference of a robotic mechanism and used Cinema 4D to model it by hand, changing some elements and adding others, like the arms, giving it a more futuristic look,” Romero recalls.

Next, they made a basic rig for the animation before visualizing the sole emerging from a base of granular material. X-Particles was used to help create an effectful simulation.

The weave simulation introduces the unique single-knit textile and features the hero moment showing how the knitted fabric also covers the sole. “The biggest challenge was to knit all the threads using the same patterns, textures, and materials seen in the real shoe,” Ponce explains, adding that the woven effect was made with Cinema 4D’s Displacer Deformer controlled with Fields,

“The hardest part of making the stitch pattern of the sole was the modeling and the UVs; all the knitted threads are texture with displacement made ad-hoc,” he continues. “The threads woven together at the edge are directed by a cloner with animation of each thread directed by the same previous field, a technique we also used to direct opacity and wave effect.”

The final touch was using Redshift to add hyper-realism, an integral feature of TA\VO Studio’s work. “The displacement tool allowed us to work with few polygons and achieve high-level results very fast,” Ponce explains. “We work really efficiently with Redshift and rely on its speed and real-time tools for production and post-production.”

Launched across social media earlier this year, the video proved successful with Givenchy fans and has led to conversations about further collaborations. Artists in the creative industries also congratulated TA\VO Studio on the project, calling out the beauty of the knitwork. “To have creative freedom and an opportunity to develop beautiful things with a client is a powerful experience, and we had fun doing what we love,” Ponce says.