Lumen & Mass

3D motion-design studio — est. 2019, Copenhagen & Los Angeles

Lumen & Mass

We treat light as a material. Weight, refraction, and time —
composed into films and real-time systems for brands that move.

01 — Disciplines

Four ways we bend light around a brand

  1. Motion Identity

    Logo behaviours, not logo animations. We define how an identity accelerates, settles, refracts and rests — a physics the brand obeys everywhere it appears, from a two-second sting to a stadium screen.

    reels · stings · systems
  2. Product Film

    Macro-optical studies of objects that deserve them. Caustics traced by hand, materials pushed past photoreal into the believable-impossible. If your product has mass, we will give it light.

    launch films · loops
  3. Real-Time

    Shaders shipped to production. Installations, configurators and web experiences that render at the frame rate of attention — sixty images a second, none of them wasted.

    WebGL · installations
  4. Typographic Systems

    Type set in space, not on a page. Kinetic specimens, variable-font choreography, letterforms that catch highlights like machined metal. Language, given a surface.

    kinetic type · titles
02 — Selected works

Case studies in weight and wavelength

Halide OpticsMotion identity2025

HALIDE

“A lens company whose logo behaves like a lens.”

For a heritage lens maker entering cinema glass, we built an identity that literally refracts: the wordmark passes through a simulated element and disperses into its brand spectrum. Forty-one deliverables, one optical law.

Deliverables
41
Render hours
2,140
Dispersion passes
3 λ

Vanta Core AudioProduct film2024

VANTA CORE

A subwoofer filmed like a planet. We treated 40 Hz as terrain — pressure waves deformed a chrome fluid in slow motion, lit by a single travelling source. The launch film ran silent for its first nineteen seconds; pre-orders sold out in six hours.

Production specifications for Vanta Core
Runtime01:12
Frame rate96 fps, conformed to 24
Sim cache11.8 TB fluid
Light sourcesOne. That was the point.

Museum of Almost NothingReal-time installation2024

SOFT PRISM

Visitors walked through a corridor of projected glass that did not exist. Twelve metres of raymarched refraction, rendered live at 120 Hz, bending around each body that passed — a prism with manners.

The entire installation ran on two consumer GPUs. Constraint was the medium: every effect had to survive a frame budget of 8.3 milliseconds, and the ones that didn’t weren’t good enough anyway.

Visitors
212,000
Frame budget
8.3 ms
Dropped frames
0 recorded
03 — Approach

A short manifesto on light

Light is not an effect. It is the subject.

Mass is not geometry. It is patience — the frame or two an object takes to admit it has weight.

We do not add glow. We remove everything that isn’t glowing for a reason.

Every render is a negotiation between a photon and a deadline. The photon wins.

Fresnel first

Edges tell the truth about materials. We design the grazing angle before the beauty shot.

One light, then earn the second

Complexity is added only when a single source has been exhausted.

Frame-rate honesty

If it can’t hold 60, it isn’t finished. Performance is part of the art direction.

Recognition and clients

Recognition

  • FWA of the Month×3
  • Awwwards — Site of the Day×7
  • ADC Motion Craft, Gold2025
  • SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live, shortlist2024
  • D&AD Wood Pencil, Moving Image2023

Selected clients

  • Halide OpticsKyoto
  • Vanta Core AudioBerlin
  • Museum of Almost NothingRotterdam
  • Meridian WatchworksGeneva
  • Aurelia FragranceParis
04 — Contact

Bring us something heavy.

We take on six projects a year. Tell us what your object weighs,
and what it should feel like when the light finds it.

studio@lumenandmass.example
Copenhagen — Refshalevej 167A Los Angeles — 1042 Mateo St