Client
University of French Polynesia
Year
2025
Deliverable
Custom greeting card and its Animated short film
Role
Greeting card creation, Direction and Animation of its Animated short film.
The University of French Polynesia had 25 years to celebrate. 25 years of shared knowledge, in a territory where each island rests on its own cultural libraries.
For their 2025 New Year’s wishes, we made them a card that opens like a manuscript. Black background, like the ones read by candlelight, gilded borders, antique typography. And a contemporary tiki at the center — to gather past and present into a single figure.
Five values, three languages
For the video, we carried the UPF’s five commitments — culture, evolution, student support, internationalization, research — in three languages.
The culture value became:
Une âme polynésienne ancrée et vivante
‘Ia vai ora noa te vaerua mā’ohi
A grounded and living Polynesian soul.
And so on for the other four. A Pacific university doesn’t have to choose between its languages.
The detail that changed the brief
And then there’s the detail we slipped in without making too much of it. Part of the card detaches. It becomes a bookmark.
That’s when the brief became something else.
Print is the most demanding medium. What we make in digital can be corrected. Paper, by contrast, is final. What you print will stay exactly as it is — set on a desk, slipped into a bag, forgotten inside a book.
So we figured that instead of a typical greeting card that ends up in the trash come January, we’d make one that travels. One that fits between the pages of a book you love. One that reappears by surprise, six months later, in the middle of a chapter.
