Dexter Jameson for Aurora TentsBrand . Art direction . Built it
AURORA
They sell the twenty minutes at dusk when the lights come on inside a field of cream canvas.
Generated imagery, labelled as such on the page01 / 12
They sell the twenty minutes at dusk when the lights come on inside a field of cream canvas.
Before anything was generatedI drew it before I generated anything. Sky, then the field, then inside. My own annotation reads "pink, orange, warm tones", and that instruction survived the whole build.
The entire brief. Twelve phone photographs.
What there was to work with
Same subject, same light, same value, nearly the same hue. Cream canvas in warm light, twelve times. A grid would have averaged them into one.
The field . green
The screen . duskAurora is named after a phenomenon everybody pictures as green, and their printed board is exactly that. The physical world keeps it, because it is already standing in a field. Everything on screen moves to a summer dusk.
Rejected
The referenceI let the skies be reinterpreted freely and locked the tent: every tent in the frame is this exact tent, faithfully reproduced.
Traced the negative space
Reverted, still ragged
Shipped, cleaned by hand
So I wrote a script to lift the letters off the signboard. It traced the space around them instead.
And my check passed it: 218 curves, 12 subpaths matching, 99.31% of the ink retained. All true, all irrelevant. Ink overlap is high whether you keep the letters or the space around them.
Never redrawn. A hand fixed it.
01 . 223 frames
02 . the field arrives
03 . 124 frames
04 . 90 framesI painted 437 frames across three sequences, so the day moves at the speed you read and stops when you stop.
The first film is an edit before it is anything else
It opens on sky with no ground in it, which is the only frame in the sequence not selling a tent. A hero image gives you the same field in the first second, and it is worth less for having been free.
Before
After
Gutterless bands, a pinned label with the images running past, and one frame with the layout changing under it. All three built. All three verified: zero errors, no overflow, all twelve photographs used, honest captions.
"I dont like any of the gallery designs, scrap them."
Dex, in full. I deleted them the same day.
I planned them off section boundaries. Padding differs per section, so a heading does not start where its section does. Measure the head, never the section.
Take one . five headings clipped by the frame edgeTake two . every pause on a whole beat
No framework, no build step. 172MB of frames across four resolution tiers, of which one visitor downloads a fraction.
Booking figures sit with Aurora. I have not been given one, so there is not one here.