From Form’s Amsterdam Museum Night campaign is a portal to another dimension

Last year, From Form released the 2023 Amsterdam Museum Night campaign to much fanfare. The grainy, meticulous, flipbook approach spoke to a tech-saturated creative industry that was in dire need of some analogue beauty and fun-filled projects on their screens. Following on from such popularity you can imagine there was a lot of pressure resting on this year’s campaign. But, lo and behold, the duo have only gone and smashed it out of the park again. In a bold move, they’ve scrapped the flipbook approach that served them so well, and turned to the visual world of time travel, all the while maintaining the DIY touch that underpins the From Form ethos.

The direction came after From Form founders Ashley Govers and Jurjen Versteeg decided that they wanted to move the focus of the campaign from the museums, to the attendees. The event consists of hundreds of museums across Amsterdam opening into the later hours, for one night only. “With such an extensive program, it’s easy to gravitate towards well-known spots and visit Rembrandt’s Nachtwacht or Van Gogh,” says Ashley. “However, if you dig a little deeper, there’s so much more to explore. For example, the Pipe Museum boasts a collection of over 30,000 pipes. Or Tot Zover, a museum which delves into cultural traditions surrounding death and funerals.”

With this in mind, Ashley and Jurjen wanted to encourage visitors to “move and explore like never before”, says Jurjen. He continues: “That means moving physically to other parts of town, but more often, it is about moving through a feeling or experience. During Museum Night, you can move through the past, present and future.” So, the dimension-hopping concept ended up being twofold; not only do museums offer portals through time, but actually trying to get to as many museums you’d like to would likely take a helping hand from time travel.

One of the core focuses for the visuals was movement – specifically, the movement of humans. A key reference for this was Eadweard Muybridge, the late 19th century photographer who made pioneering photographic studies of humans and animals in motion. “His book has long been on our desk, awaiting the right project,” says Ashley. The pair borrowed the zoetrope effect that is the central facet of his works in motion – although they used much more modern equipment than Muybridge to get there: a treadmill and burst photography.

Ashley and Jurjen did a lot of research and tests for the walk-cycles, and discovered early on that using video and continuous light felt too smooth. “After much trial and error, we settled on a more DIY, straightforward approach,” says Ashley. “The solution came when we turned to stop-motion. No longer did we have to mount lights on drilling machines or use pre-programmed LED tubes in a live-action setting – we could just click and go.” At this point another key inspiration joined the mix, the 1989 Prince of Persia game, especially “the methods the development team used to capture the game’s walk cycles through VHS recordings and analogue stop-motion animation,” says Jurjen.

Using a “mosaic” of split-screens, these dynamic walk-cycles were paired with other time-travel adjacent visuals, like trippy wormhole portals, and super zoomed-in, eerily lit close-ups of each model’s face. For these overarching elements, the pair turned to yet more late 20th century culture, including Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey (I mean, how could you not?) and the first Tron film from 1982. Swirling and shooting colours of blue, purple and and orange sit beside running figures leaping into never-ending digital dimension. There’s no denying the campaign is a heady mix – but Ashley and Jurjen have managed to strike the perfect balance between each motif, tone and colour, creating something truly striking.

Ashley and Jurjen are keen to highlight that the campaign wouldn’t be what it is without such an open-minded client – “each idea is valued, no matter how crazy it gets”, says Ashley. Even, that is, the pair’s proposal of a limited-edition vinyl that features the campaign’s original soundtrack, composed by Beau Zwart. “Museum Night immediately agreed, and two weeks later, the album was pressed and delivered,” says Jurjen, “We guess that it reminds us again of the fact that great things can arise when there’s mutual trust between client and designer.”