De Warmste Week 2023

De Warmste Week is an annual fundraiser and awareness campaign from Belgian broadcast channel VRT. Its logo is a bright orange flame, a symbol of warmth and hope in cold wintertime. For the 2023 edition, we reimagined the logo in 3D. In the campaign film produced by Hamlet, the flame is a living entity. A fire within, giving children in difficult situations the burning strength to overcome hardships.

A custom procedural setup was built in Blender’s geometry nodes to create the flame and to make it move in an organic way. This approach was combined with more traditional animation techniques. We didn’t want to settle for simply a simulation of stylized fire. The flame goes through its own little narrative development arc, so we wanted to treat it like an actual character. Hand-animated frame by frame blockouts let us give it a lot of its personality. The  faux-stop-motion rendering style gives it its friendly, almost toy-like presence.

The flame was also used as a central element in other campaign materials.