Pastiglie Leone – La Dolce Vita

YEAR 2024

CLIENT Pastiglie Leone

AGENCY Design Bridge and Partners

MY ROLE 3D Concept, LookDev, Physics Simulation, Mechanical Animation, Rendering

DURATION 5 Weeks

TOOLS Cinema 4D, X-Particles, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop

AWARDS Pentawards Platinum, FAB Awards Gold, The Drum Awards Gold, ADC Bronze Cube

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP Greg Quinton, Alessandro Foschini, Michael Stride

3D & ANIMATION Rodrigo Ortega, Gan Lin, Nina Marie Girod

2D MOTION & EDIT Benedetto Infantino, Abbi Chard

BRAND DESIGN Chris Algar, James Green, Alessandra Paglialonga, Marta Cavallin, Nicolò Giacomin, Nick Goveia

STRATEGY Laura Eyles

PRODUCTION Julia Thompson 

CLIENT TEAM Liam McDermott, Tom Lamming, Alessia Viotti, Valentina Patti Pinelli, Mario De Luca

Bridging Heritage and Modernity Founded in Turin in 1857 by Luigi Leone, Pastiglie Leone stands as a cornerstone of Italian confectionery. Their unique candies——Pastiglie, Gelatine, Gommose, Liquirizia, and Cioccolato——are part of the fabric of life for every Italian growing up. Put simply, generations of ‘magical moments’ are contained in those pretty little boxes.

As Pastiglie Leone’s footprint expanded globally, the brand faced a pivotal challenge: limited international awareness and visual fragmentation across its vast portfolio. Design Bridge’s London studio partnered with Pastiglie Leone to engineer a comprehensive brand ecosystem—unifying their diverse product range while honoring the brand’s artisanal heritage to ensure its legacy for generations to come.

A World of Sensory Mechanical Wonder Before the motion phase began, the London design team spent over a year meticulously overhauling the brand visuals for the 160-year-old Italian icon——from redefining the logomark, typography, and iconic brand patterns to redesigning 50+ individual package labels.

I joined the team as the Motion Creative Director was developing the initial rough narrative. Rather than receiving a fully defined sequence, I was given a broad assembly-line concept and tasked with figuring out how the factory actually worked. I researched traditional confectionery production and refined the mechanical logic and narrative progression of my portion of the story, from dough-making and cutting to the final filling of the boxes.

I was responsible for 10 of the 120-second film’s 22 3D shots; taking them from rough storyboard → research → narrative refinement → concept → mechanical design → modeling → rigging → animation → lookdev → lighting → simulation → rendering → final delivery within a five-week production window. Working across time zones from New York, I collaborated with the London studio to build a neo-Victorian, pastel-hued assembly line. The goal was to pivot away from cold industrial realism and toward a whimsical dream-state factory——a world of mechanical wonder inspired by the symmetrical, cinematic style of Wes Anderson.

Neo-Victorian-Wes-Anderson To fully inhabit Pastiglie Leone’s DNA, I immersed myself in the brand’s history, ranging from archival factory photography and vintage packaging to the newly updated visual system. On top of that, I spent a weekend evening renting out The Grand Budapest Hotel, studying its forced symmetry, flat composition, and distinctive color grading to capture the intended cinematic language.

By blending these visual principles with Pastiglie Leone’s pastel palette and intricate filigree, I developed custom structures, compositions, and animations unique to the brand’s new neo-Victorian aesthetic. Every interaction and choreographed movement felt intentional, satisfying, and whimsical. (We purposefully avoided the polychromatic maximalism of Willy Wonka’s factory.)

Building the Enigmatic Assembly Lines While the package models were already created by the London CGI Director before I joined the project, coming up with the mechanical world around them was entirely under my remit. Within a tight 5-week production window, I was responsible for:

• Mechanical Concepting: Designing and building the “enigmatic assembly lines” from scratch—ensuring every gear and belt felt Victorian yet modern.
• Rigging & Animation: Leveraging Cinema 4D’s Mograph tools to create a synchronized, rhythmic choreography, ensuring the sweets moved seamlessly through the “modular” stages of the factory.
• Lighting & Styleframes: Iterating on lighting setups to emphasize the soft, tactile textures of the packaging and candies against the high-end shimmer of the gold-foil accents.
• Cross-Atlantic Collaboration: Despite being the sole artist in the NY studio for the majority of the project, I maintained constant creative alignment via Teams with the London CCO, Creative Directors, designers, and editor to ensure the individual 3D scenes integrated perfectly into the final narrative.

Solving the Invisible Problems. I identified production risks early and made the technical decisions needed to keep the work on schedule. Behind the deceptively simple moving visuals were a handful of problems that could have easily turned into expensive delays, rework, or additional production overhead if they weren’t planned and resolved beforehand:

• Unstable simulations → downstream rework: Hundreds of candies had to move through the factory without clipping or behaving unpredictably. I refined the collision geometry and simulation parameters early to keep the system stable before it reached final rendering.
• A curved assembly line → bent products: One of the scenes needed to bend along a curved path without deforming the products moving through it. I built the animation setup around that constraint, allowing the machinery to follow the curve while keeping the candies rigid. 
• Autofocus failure → unreliable shots: The camera repeatedly lost focus as the machinery moved away. I replaced the unreliable autofocus with manually keyframed focal points, keeping the products sharp throughout the sequence. 
• 1,200 frames → overnight render risk: Across ten 3D shots, the final film required roughly 1,200 frames. With no room for error in the delivery schedule, a “hit-and-hope” approach to rendering wasn’t an option. I ran test renders and optimized sampling before committing to multiple overnight batches, catching failures before they affected delivery, cutting render time by half and saving 50 hours of render-farm cost.

A New Benchmark for the Agency The resulting film did more than launch a product——it established the definitive visual and motion language for Pastiglie Leone’s future.

• The Hero Piece: Since its debut, this project has remained the very first piece of the agency’s global portfolio for over two years, unusually long-lived continuous visibility for a fast-moving agency. 
• Industry Recognition: The campaign was a critical success, winning the 2024 Pentawards Platinum, FAB Awards Gold, The Drum Awards Gold, and an ADC Awards Bronze Cube. Notably, this project was a key contributor to Design Bridge and Partners being named Pentawards Design Agency of the Year 2024.
• Multinational Release The animation served as the digital heartbeat for a rollout across 7,675 stores in Europe—from the Westin Palace Hotel in Milan to Le Fromager des Halles in Paris—with further expansion into Asia underway. While the design lived on the shelves, the motion work provided the stopping power and enticing character needed to introduce the world to Leone’s new era of indulgence.