Client
Presidence 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.
Three words. That’s all we had.
Fa’aora. Fa’atupu. Fa’atura.
To heal. To grow. To honor.
It’s rare for a brief to fit in three words. Rarer still that they’re enough.
When the Presidency of French Polynesia trusted us with their 2025 New Year’s card, we understood very quickly that the point wasn’t to make something beautiful. It was to make something sacred.
In the beginning
So we let ourselves be guided by the stories we were told before drifting off to the land of dreams. In the beginning, there was nothing. Then came the song of creation — Kumulipo among the Hawaiians, Tumu i te pō among the Tahitians. A song that holds the origin of the world and the place the living are given in it. Our three words were the children of that song.
The video
For the video, we wove 2D animation — to root the message in tradition — with 3D, to carry that tradition into the present. The three words unfold their meaning in it, image after image, in a choreography we wanted slow.
But video scrolls past. And these words needed to leave a trace in the hands of those who would receive them.
The card
For the card, we chose a triptych. Three panels. A physical object that unfolds — and by its very nature, imposes a tempo.
We’ve grown used to instant greetings. Everything moves so fast now. The attention economy has accelerated everything — including the moments that deserved to be slow. The triptych resists that. You open it. The gesture takes time. And each unfolding reveals something else.
On the outside, a starlit sky. The Polynesian sky — the one our ancestors read to cross the Ocean.
You open it. At the center, a golden canoe — a sacred sail ringed by the phases of the moon, like a ritual compass.
You unfold further. A full sky map appears. The constellations are named in both languages — Orion / Taurua o mere ma tutahi, the Pleiades / Matarii, the Southern Cross / Tahua. And in the middle of these stars, Scorpius — which we call Matau Nui here, the great hook. Māui’s hook, still up there, hanging in the sky as it always has.
It’s on that sky that we inscribed, in letters of gold, the President’s message. A message that doesn’t float in the void of a generic greeting card — a message set among the stars that guided our ancestors.
And then you turn the object over. On the back, the Tārena 2025 — the Polynesian lunar calendar. So that this object wouldn’t be a card looked at once, but a companion that follows its owner all year long.
Three words in the video. An entire sky in the hand.
That’s what we wanted to offer those who would receive these wishes: not a wish, but an orientation.
