■
✦
■
✦
✦
■
✦
■
DESCRIPTION
In 2025, my colleague Dilmana Yordanova and I were commissioned by Zeppelin Design to create a series of animations for the Cazino Constanța Exhibition Center, a landmark building on the Romanian Black Sea coast, restored and reimagined as a cultural space after nearly a century of history.
// Year
2025
// Category
Motion Design & Animation
// Industry
Entertainment
// Timeline
8 Weeks
CHALLENGE
SOLUTION
Our contribution was a set of 8 animated stories projected on large LED screens throughout the venue, each one imagining a different corner of the Casino's life: Baccarat and billiard rooms, jazz nights, boxing matches, masked balls, theater performances, and sun-drenched seaside terraces. Process After researching an extensive archive of photographs and stories from the Casino's golden age, we developed a custom VFX pipeline built around AI-generated characters. Characters were created in Midjourney and stylized to resemble graphic illustrations from the Belle Époque period, semi-flat, poster-like, with a deliberately theatrical quality. They were then animated on greenscreen using AI tools (Kling, Hailuo), cleaned up frame by frame, and composited as 2D layers into 3D reconstructions of the actual casino spaces built in Cinema 4D. Final compositing, color grading, and VFX were handled in After Effects. The visual language drew from two main references: the elegance of Belle Époque aesthetics and the psychological tension of Film Noir - warm illusion on one side, cool melancholy on the other.
RESULT
Over 70 animated shots were produced in just over two months. In 2025, the Cazino Constanța Exhibition Center was awarded the iF Design Award — one of the world's oldest and most respected design prizes, recognizing excellence in exhibition design and visitor experience. The award belongs to the full team behind the project, led by Zeppelin Design, whose vision held everything together. We're proud our animations were part of it.
Explore More ✱ Explore More ✦
