Laufey - Drawing to 3D Workflow

Brief

When we were asked to create video content for Laufey’s A Matter of Time US Arena Tour, we knew it had to be beautiful—but with a touch of darkness and awkwardness, as Junia, her sister and Creative Director, described it. The challenge was to stay within a sense of grown-up elegance while embracing full-blown whimsy.

Stufish’s set design featured playful arches framing two curved staircases that led up to a central arch holding a swing. It felt somewhere between a Fred and Ginger set and Elsa’s Castle—rooted in old Hollywood but with a fairytale twist. This gave us the chance to move beyond the usual square or rectangular screen format, pushing us to experiment with off-centre compositions that reflected the shape and spirit of the set itself.

Concept

With the brief in mind, we set out to find a framing device that would echo the physical set and maintain a softly dreamlike tone. That’s where the idea of a 3D set extension emerged—an imagined layer of architecture designed to blur the line between the real and the virtual.

But clean, polished 3D wasn’t the right fit for this world. Instead, we turned to a technique Hanna had been developing: using hand-drawn illustrations as the foundation for 3D geometry. This approach was inspired by Ida Lissner’s stunning work, which reminded us how a human touch can bring warmth and soul to digital worlds.

Our process began with a recurring motif—the dagger. Dozens of sketches were made in search of the perfect balance between elegance and tension. It became our first proof of concept, full of experimentation and discovery. The dagger first appeared in the Overture before taking centre stage in Sabotage, where it split the sky and sent lightning across the stage. For that sequence, Lighting and Video worked in perfect harmony to craft a suitably dramatic finale.

Process

First sketches of daggers

The chosen dagger converted to vectors

The vectors converted to splines in Cinema 4D

Drawing

It doesn't have to be perfect, but it helps to use a ruler or other tools to make sure your basic lines are straight. In the beginning, everything was completely freehand, but as we moved into more architectural drawing's Hanna started working with more tools for the underlying sketches. Those were done in pencil and then overdrawn in marker or brush and ink. It's important to get a high contrast, clear image down the line in the process.

Scanning the Drawing

This is just what it says on the tin. You don't need crazy resolutions. I scanned at 300DPI and TIFF format, so I had maximum colour depth to find exactly the right threshold for creating the outline in Illustrator.

Creating Vectors from Pixels

Import the scan either directly into Adobe Illustrator or first into Photoshop. If you're happy with your lines and the clarity of your drawing go straight for illustrator. If not, it's worth using Levels in Photoshop to increase the contrast ensuring all your blacks are black and your whites are white. This makes creating vectors in Illustrator a little easier.
In illustrator just drag and drop your image in and open the Image Trace window. Set that to black and white and play with the path and corner settings to get an outline you like. Then you can trace! After tracing there's often a little editing that needs to still happen. Cinema 4D doesn't like paths that consist of only two anchor points so it's important to add points to those. I also adjusted for slightly less random corners and a smoother look.

The vectors converted to splines in Cinema 4D

3D Model of the dagger

Vectors to 3D

Save the Illustrator file as an Illustrator 8 file and drag and drop it into Cinema 4D. It will import as a spline. You then group the spline under an Extrude object. For the mirror in Snow White, Hanna set the distance to 0.2mm and played with the caps to get rounded geometry.

Create a 3D Lighting set-up and Materials

We used Redshift in this process to get more depth in our reflections and dispersion in transparency. It adds a small amount of extra detail, which really elevates a 3D render and underlines that organic touch that our drawing process aims for. For the dagger, Hanna used a Studio HDRI and a Dome light to add detail to the brushed metal material she used from the Cinema 4D content browser. Textures for that can be found online easily. No other lighting was needed in this instance.

Grading

We took the render into Adobe After Effects to apply a grade to give it the old film feel that we created across the show. Hanna used the After Effects Plugin Magic Bullet Looks in this instance, adding a custom look containing Diffusion (which adds a soft glow) and a few different gradients.

Content to Stage

From Adobe After Effects we render out the whole video in the codec NotchLC. This allows some compression but keeps enough colour information to look great on screen. Our project is set to 16 bit colour as the system on this show ran on 10 bit rather than 8. When we've rendered our content it goes into Disguise - the software used to program the video for this show. This is where live camera feeds and content are combined and everything is set up to play in sync with the other departments. On this show we used a time-code signal to trigger the video content.

Timelapse - Snow White mirror drawing to 3D to content

Timelapse - Dreamer castle drawing to 3D

We used this process for a number of songs, which needed a magical element that felt straight out of a dream or a nightmare. The floating glass castle in Dreamer was one of our favourite outcomes. We combined lots of drawings to create all parts of the geometry which formed the castle. We felt like it added a little awkwardness to an image which could have leant too hard into Disney sweetness.

Having repeated the process for multiple elements in the show we came to appreciate the resulting look of this process. The analogue, organic and "real world" quality it has is hard to achieve with digital tools alone. This process also gave us the perfect conceptual framework (literally), to bring together more digital aesthetics with the songs, which are more fairytale leaning and purely based on drawings like Sabotage. In this song, we skipped the 3D process and only used the original drawings, leaning hard into the storybook aesthetic. This was made by placing the images in 3D Z-depth in Adobe After Effects and animating a camera to travel through them on the Z-axis in time with the music.

Drawing Timelapse

Drawing scanned and cleaned up as it went into content

Snippet of show content

As the song developes we end up in 3D space again and due to the same origins of the drawings and 3D geometry, the transition did not feel jarring but rather an intensification.

Live Camera

We also knew we wanted to incorporate live camera feeds of Laufey performing into the content because the IMAG screens either side of the stage were on the smaller side. To ensure Laufey remained visible and connected with the audience, we integrated the live camera feeds into content throughout the show. The camera treatment was kept simple and elegant, with a clean visual approach to balance the busier show content. A soft, natural colour grade was applied to enhance Laufey’s presence and ensure she looked beautiful in all shots. We used the framed the live camera feed on the side screens with the same arches we used in content, creating a cohesive and refined visual experience.

What a treat to work on this beautiful show to music that didn't leave our heads for literal weeks. Thanks to everyone involved!