Delight and captivate the crowd as they arrive at Wikimania 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual conference. We created an opening ceremony video and set of “Where’s Waldo-inspired” postcards that denote humanmade craft through and through.
I directed the video project which follows a band of lightbulbs on an evening walk through Paris as they pass by a building lit up by Francophone luminaries in the windows, greet Baby Globe, and eventually everyone (including le rat) do a Champagne toast before the sun comes up and it’s time to arrive at Wikimania venue. Attention to detail is key: we intentionally made the French supers more artful than the English subtitles, included a few in jokes, and even made a mood board of Luce fashion.
notes:
There’s something called a law of panorama in France, which bars you from featuring certain buildings—so we had to get very creative with illustrated overlays on the Eiffel Tower, Louvre pyramid, and conference venue. We tapped the French community to help us with everything from script translation to doing the voiceover in French and selecting which people and places to feature, making sure that everything felt as authentic as possible.
The Postcards
Idea:
Pitched idea of designing a collection of Where’s Waldo-inspired postcards, featuring Baby Globe. In the postcards, there are five different versions of Baby Globe that we ask people to find in three unique settings: The Louvre, Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen and La cité des sciences et de l'industrie (the conference venue). We included lots of fun winks, like French inventions, a public domain cartoon, and the Wikipede mascot, working with the same illustrator as the opening ceremony video to pull it all off.
role:
I directed the video project, developed a script and storyboard and worked closely with a talented designer to illustrate and animate the frames, along with other team members including an art director, conferred with legal about imagery, briefed sound mixing partner, and attributed every image and sfx. With the postcard project, I contributed ideas around the places and the fact that we should include five versions of Baby Globe, and provided feedback.
