About — Formation
Pictures thathold still whileeverything moves.
Lisbon · 38.72° N, 9.14° W
Scroll — 01 / 05
A studio in Lisbon
working mostly in weather
Formation started as an argument about whether a photograph should explain itself. Nine years later we are still on the losing side of it, and the work is better for the silence.
We take on six or seven projects a year. Everything on the index was made by the same four people, usually in the same van, usually at an hour nobody would choose.
Practice — 02
- 01
Art Direction
We arrive before the moodboard and stay past the grade. One person holds the picture from the first conversation to the last export.
- 02
Photography
Long lenses, longer waits. We would rather lose a day to weather than win one with a plate we did not earn.
- 03
Motion & Titles
Sequences built the way a room is built — on a floor, at a scale, with somewhere for the eye to rest between the type.
- 04
Editorial
Essays, spreads and covers for people who still print things. Words set as carefully as the images they sit beside.
Note — 03
The best brief we ever received was four words long, and two of them were the client’s name. Everything after that was just waiting for the light to agree.
Colophon — 04
- Founded
- 2016, on a borrowed table
- Studio
- Four people, one long room
- Fields
- Art direction, photography, motion, editorial
- Clients
- Lumen, Aurora Films, Atlas Journal, Helio, Crimson
- Recognition
- D&AD Pencil, ADC Cube, TDC Certificate
- Kit
- Two bodies, one truck, an unreasonable amount of ND
