Aggressive and LOOP Craft a Metaphorical CG Medley for COP28

Multidisciplinary collectives Aggressive and LOOP today look back on their work on the launching the COP28 Local Climate Action Summit, hosted at the end of last year in Dubai.

Bloomberg Philanthropies enlisted longtime collaborators Aggressive and LOOP to create an immersive, large-scale opening film that underscores local leaders’ role in reducing emissions, addressing climate risk, and supercharging national efforts to move further and faster on climate progress. Aside from details for the voice over and a selection of key features, the open brief granted creative freedom to Aggressive and LOOP to take the aesthetics where they deemed best.

The team drew from their extensive experience with eco-themed projects, spotlighting natural materials, textures, forms, and lighting. Architecture serves as the thematic core linking a medley of diverse CG visuals, punctuated with statements from major city mayors across the globe. Pollution is pulled from the air and garbage bags grow compact for storage, while buildings begin to bloom and conserve abstract blocks of water.

As the strikingly intricacy of the visuals suggests, the film was technically demanding to make. One of the main challenges was forming procedurally generated structures from cube-shaped segments that would facilitate quick edits during the initial visual research and development stage. LOOP’s main tool in the construction was the powerful and versatile engine tyFlow, especially for any particle-related tasks; each cube seen on screen is a particle.

Max Chelyadnikov, executive producer and creative director at LOOP, comments, “I personally believe that our collaboration with Aggressive is a very rare case for any business, let alone the volatile CG- and design-related industry. We're always on the same page working as one and always delivering. All in all just an extremely efficient team — something that we have achieved with years of experience together and I hope we'll see more jobs like this in the nearest future to bring more of our ideas to life.”