Tango Calor
Trum, tan tan ta… trum. You hear that? That’s the sound of a tango. A hot one. Maybe too hot.
This summer, temperatures across Europe and pretty much everywhere else hit levels that were excessive. Dangerous, even. And that heatwave pushed us to do something about it. Nothing grand. Just a simple, friendly reminder to stay cool and, above all, stay hydrated.
Paloma lives somewhere in the Mediterranean. The kind of place where the midday sun hits without mercy.
And when even the faintest breeze disappears, that’s when the tango starts. Wild, frantic, desperate for a little cool air. Because everyone knows: in summer, even a glass of water feels like a miracle.
something fresh
We wanted to make something fresh. In every sense of the word.
The idea of setting an entire story inside a tiny 3D set was too good to pass up. So we went for it. We threw everything we had at it: 3D elements, cell animation, lines, weights, textures. All mixed together into one small, strange, beautiful piece of mixed media.
Boundless expressiveness
Paloma, our hot character, does not do things by halves. She feels everything intensely. Including the heat. So every move she makes is both an expression and a dance step. A pose, a feeling, a tango all at once.
Legs stretched, shoulders swaying, fans fanning. Everything moves to the rhythm, like magic.
Animating to the track let us turn this into a real performance. A hot one.
The essential details
Feeling thirsty? We get it.
In just 25 seconds we tried to make you feel the heat. Every detail is there for a reason. The character’s outline shifts every time she drinks, every time she cools down. Red to blue. Hot to fresh.
One color change. One instant message. A thousand words saved.
flaming textures
A huge part of the work lived in the lookdev of the scene props.
The set, the plants, the curtains, the tiles. Every single detail is soaked in Mediterranean culture, deliberately scattered somewhere between southern Italy, Spain and Greece. A place that doesn’t really exist but feels completely real. We wanted a scene you could almost touch. One that carries a culture that has no price.
To get textures this good, we combined Blender and Substance Painter into one workflow. Full control over every single detail.
The game was simple: real materials applied to simplified forms. The contrast between the two is where the magic lives.
An incandescent combo.
blender at its maximum
We love Blender as a creative tool. Not exactly a secret.
But this time we pushed it further. The entire animation was done in Grease Pencil, drawing directly inside the 3D set and keeping compositing to a minimum.
And let’s be honest: rotating a camera around a 2D drawing never gets old.
tales behind the tiles
When it came to the maioliche, that’s what we call them in Italy, those gorgeous decorative tiles, we made sure to honor the tradition. Even while painting them digitally.
Our illustrator sketched them first in Figma, then repainted every single one by hand in Procreate. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Just to make sure you could feel the craft, the texture, the human touch behind it.
And the title tiles? Same process. Every letter painted by hand. A custom typeface built specifically for this project, from scratch.
Caliente, right?
