Stefan Draht, aka Saint (short for St. Efan), is a designer/animator/director living and working in Chicago. Stefan has always been fascinated by how things work and how problems can be solved visually. This passion for understanding and interpreting the world has really driven his creative approach. It is not simply enough to make something that looks interesting, but it must also somehow function. Whether it is to tell a story, make sense of a complex concept, drive a user experience, or build a brand identity the importance of a design's purpose is foremost Stefan's concern. In order to achieve these goals Stefan has sought to fuse the creative, right brain, approach with cutting edge technology and the methodical left brain analysis. This combination leads to solutions that are both evocative and visually potent while being carefully planned and executed to highly controlled standards.

Demoreel covering work through Spring 2009.

Mode Project was tapped by DDB Worldwide to create an engaging introduction to David Plouffe's presentation at the Cannes Lions festival. Mode Project attacked the mission on two fronts, creating a stirring edit of Obama campaign footage and enhancing it with an elegant graphical system. Lindsay Daniels (creative director) helped to solidify the concept of interconnectedness and networking, which was so important in the campaign, with a potent, but not overpowering, design approach. Stefan's roll was to execute and elaborate upon this system of graphics and integrate them into the overall video piece. We brought in many talented freelancers to help in the execution of the various design elements and so Stefan was able to help maintain consistency across the various integrated-design shots while executing some of the more technically demanding shots.

The event poster represented an interesting technical challenge and a great opportunity to utilize Stefan's programming skill. The poster called for a multitude of small logos making up the face of David Plouffe, similar to how Chuck Close may have approached things. Since we didn't have the kind of time that Mr. Close has for a full piece and since we could foresee a need for an editable piece Stefan had to create a program that could generate the effect given a set of logos as input.

Stefan acted as creative director to make sure the Flash banner to reflected the concepts and style of the event poster while at the same time distilling the design to work within a banner size.

Agency / Client

Bob Scarpelli, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer DDB Worldwide
Diane Jackson, SVP Executive Director of Integrated Production DDB Chicago
Jessi Dana, Associate Producer DDB Chicago
Jason Karley, Associate Creative Director DDB Chicago
Galen Graham, Associate Creative Director DDB Chicago

Mode Project

Colin Carter, Executive Creative Director
Kathleen Quinn, Executive Producer
Brooks Ruyle, Managing Director / Editor
Lindsay Daniels, Creative Director
Stefan Draht, Designer / Animator
Eric Miro, Designer / Animator
Brett Schnacky, Designer / Animator
Rebecca Berdel, Designer / Animator
Randi Razalenti, Operations Assistant
Joie Mikitson, Executive Interactive Producer
Derek Olson, Interactive Designer / Developer

Stefan created the endtag for a Suave Professionals spot at Mode Project (reincarnation of MODE). The Suave flag itself was created as a cloth element in 3d to give it a silky, natural, feel to reflect the flowing and unfurling of shiny healthy hair.

Created as a fun experiments, and internal promotional pieces, these cheeky shorts wound up becoming great showcases of what can be accomplished with a simple concept/story and thoughtful execution. Created by Stefan Draht with additional modeling provided by Brett Schnacky.

Stefan was tasked with creating the 3d elements and camera moves for this Obama campaign spot which involved a 3d ball of yarn unraveling. The concept was that McCain's healthcare plan would unravel, just like the ball of yarn, until there was nothing left and the participants would be left hanging, much like the lone strand at the end of the spot. The challenge was to very quickly turn around a full 3d spot involving the relatively complex yarn-ball element. There was very little time to do R&D on the shaders and animation techniques that would be required to execute the yarn look but in the end we were able to create a look that was both reasonable to render in a short period of time and captured the feeling of yarn.

Created as a proof of concept for a bio-pool promotion this piece turned into an interesting technical experiment. The concept was to use capture the physiological experience of entering a bio-pool, which is a pool of water filled with phosphorescent see life that glows and responds to your movements. We decided to tell the story of the user's heart as they enter the pool and experience the environment. We ultimately created an interactive program that would take heart-rate data as an input and use it to stimulate, or animate, a neural network of interconnected points. The network could be setup in either a random configuration or as that of an imported 3d model. The final piece uses the exported frames form this program to demonstrate the effect.

It was Stefan's responsibility to develop the custom program (written in Processing) as well as design the final look of the piece.

video coming soon

Created for MODE's showreel these animated arrow elements represent the output from a program Stefan developed to take video footage as an input and analyze its motion to apply the resulting velocity vectors to graphic assets. The video footage documents the process of creating MODE's letterpress identity packaging and so it seemed appropriate to apply these additional graphic elements based on the visual components of MODE's logo at the time.

This piece was a longer form, internal, promotional piece for the Schawk! brand. The concept centered around the blank white square traveling through the organization from team member to team member. the square was, for the most part, shot as a practical element on set and MODE set to the task of figuring out a way to add streaming particle trails to the motion of the card. The traditional particle effects proved unsatisfactory, as they were difficult to control, uncooperative with reflecting the actual motion of the object, and cumbersome to render. Stefan created a custom program, based on the motion analysis in the MODE Reel project, that would take the motion, extracted in the compositing phase, as an input and generate customizable trails based on the velocity and path of motion of the input. In the end the solution allowed us to efficiently create visually consistent particle elements that could be composited back into the live action plates.

Created as an experimental bit of abstract design and motion. All the major elements were generated dynamically with custom written programs for animating growing polygon strips and forming large, gravity based, networks.

This is the experimental result of a program that generates large networks of masses that respond to fluctuations in gravity and attraction.

video coming soon

Created as a, potential, promotional pice for Falcon NW computers as a companion piece to the website animation project. Stefan brought the piece from concept to execution and revealed the engineering, power, falcon found inside each one of Falcon NW's computers.

Drawing a conceptual link between the high degree of precision engineering that goes into each Falcon NW computer and the intricate mechanics of a falcon in flight was the theme of this piece. Stefan helped to develop the concept at Targetscope where he also designed, animated, and composited the final piece.

video coming soon

The interconnectedness of global foreign exchange exposure, in addition to being a mouthful, is traditionally difficult to represent visually. Targetscope, as a creative partner to FiREapps, created an animated piece to accompany a presentation that FiREapps would make to describe the value of their risk management system. It was important to represent the different world currencies as interconnected nodes that, once properly managed, could be crystallized from their, normally, chaotic state into a clear and easy to read state. Stefan was responsible for executing the animation and translating the concepts and designs for the atomic model into 3d and bringing it to life.

video coming soon

Mary Kay launched a new compact design and needed a promotional piece that would display the various new features and innovations of the new design. The art director had a fairly specific vision for the look of the piece and so ElementX was tasked with executing and translating that vision. The piece was to feel similar to a high-end car commercial and lighting played a very important role in achieving the look. Stefan's job was to act as lighting and rendering TD which meant setting up the lights, shadows, and reflections to achieve the desired look as well as handle the technicalities of rendering such lighting setups.

video coming soon

The purpose of this piece was to showcase the Mary Kay Cadillacs available as potential rewards. It was important that the piece highlight the dancing cars in a dynamic, but uncluttered, environment. The client wanted to be able to form patterns, shapes, and information with the flipping background tiles. It was Stefan's responsibility to come up with a set of rigs for the wall elements that would allow the animators a good degree of control over the patterns formed on the wall while minimizing and simplifying the controls. It was infeasible to have the animators animate the walls one tile at a time so Stefan created a set of scripts, expressions, and controls in Maya that would allow us to dynamically generate walls of varying sizes and resolutions as well as automatically attach the appropriate controls and sliders for the animators to use.