NYC Announcement

Accept & Proceed had developed the visual direction and locked the storyboard. The shot was a continuous descent: from a point cloud globe down to NYC, into a point cloud Manhattan, to street level, and finally to a human figure formed from particles before resolving into footage.

Neko's distinctive point cloud avatar, central to the scan experience, was being extended into new contexts and made to carry the full weight of the launch. The job was to bring that journey to life in motion, at the technical and aesthetic level the concept demanded, on a timeline of 17 days that ran across the Christmas break.

A point cloud is, in a sense, defined by motion. Static, it reads as noise; moving, it reads as form, system, intent. The whole launch concept lived in that distinction, which meant every frame had to be built from scratch: the point cloud, the 2D animated UI, compositing, and final delivery.

The Manhattan sequence was the centre of gravity. A 3D model of the city was used as a distribution surface for over two million particles, with the look developed iteratively. Too structured and the cloud felt diagrammatic. Too loose and the city dissolved entirely. Finding the line between those two states, then holding it consistently across a continuous camera move from orbit to street level, was the bulk of the technical work.

Built in Cinema 4D with X-Particles, rendered in Redshift, composited and edited in After Effects. Redshift suited the particle counts and the lighting strategy, a deliberate decision for the project rather than a default.

The 2D UI elements, which referenced Neko's data visualisation language, were animated to sit inside the 3D world without breaking the throughline of the camera move.

Delivery covered the hero film and a recut social version, supplied across the formats Neko's launch needed.

The film posted on LinkedIn drew 2.2K interactions, 140+ comments and 180+ reposts. The Instagram cut reached 124K views and 1.6K likes, meaningful reach for an announcement landing into a new US market with no inherited audience.