Jon Formento is the founder of the eponymous, London-based CG and 3D boutique, jformento. With 3ds Max and Maya as his tool of choice, the Brazilian born artist has been creating in 3D nearly his entire life. The boutique's lush visual language finds a home in their excellent 3D motion designs, product viz, and arch viz work for high-profile clients ranging from IKEA and HBF to Moncler and even an upcoming project with Kanye West's YEEZY.
Recently, Formento was an official guest speaker for the 20th anniversary of the London Design Festival, fresh off the heels of a 2022 Dezeen Awards shortlist nomination for his boutique's "Visual Escapism" project. Hear directly from Jon as he tells AREA more about his studio's recent work, personal inspirations, and offers some words of advice to other burgeoning creatives in the 3D landscape.
My name is Jonathan Formento. I’m a Creative Director, 3D Designer and founder of jformento., a London based 3D and CGI boutique. I started my journey in 3D at a very young age in my native Brazil. I was very curious about architecture and design, but most importantly, I was incredibly into BMX and a close friend back in the day told me: “Have you heard of 3ds Max? You can model your own skate-parks on it”. I was sold.
I’ve always wanted to have my own business since I was about sixteen years old. It took quite some time before I tried. Lots of learning, working in different companies to understand how it properly works. And then, interestingly enough, in 2020, amidst the pandemic I decided it was time.
We’re a young, small and insanely ambitious 3D studio. We work over a variety of projects in many different industry realms ranging from concept architecture, design, motion graphics and even fintech — but always with motion and 3D at its very core.
That’s a tricky question. You know, I could say we have great quality, speed, tech... but these are too generic. And quite relative, too.
It may sound vague, but I believe we’re incredibly self-aware people. Reality is, we’re good at perception. Putting ourselves into someone else’s shoes, adapting, understanding different markets in which our work is being shared with, changing tone/mood accordingly and so on.
We love diving deep on conceptual work and exploring the ins and outs of a given project, depicting all its meanings, connections and nuances to artistically create something. But we also know when it’s time to embrace the commercial side of things and understand there’s a goal, message and values to be shared.
I’ve been an avid user of 3ds Max for the past 15 years. I use it every day at work. Our clients live within the product design industry. Furniture, products, fashion, tech, you name it. Having robust 3D software to handle polygons, huge scenes and adapting to different needs is essential for what we do.
Recently, we’ve been working intensely with digital landscapes and abstract architectural spaces. Being it for placing products or simply to communicate space, we always need a package in which we’ll be able to flexibly change and iterate. 3ds Max has always given me that. It feels architectural and it’s got the precision we need to make that happen, it's got a really good measurement system in which we require daily as well as a great layering system, for which when working with massive scenes, gives a great sense of organization. It is solid.
The short answer is possibilities.
The past few years, the fashion industry has changed greatly as for the usage of CGI. You see great brands creating some outstanding conceptual work and using 3D as another layer of outputs. We see what the big fashion houses are doing with Metaverse particularly and the scale they’re acting.
Further, if you look around, the amount of people the fashion companies hire straight from art-schools is amazing. And all this new talent comes in the industry hungry for concept, exploration and experimentation, leading to some really amazing unexpected results. And being part of that is just something special. It opens up some wonderful doors for research and development.
We recently worked on a lovely project in which we can’t really describe who it was for, but the concept was to create a series of surreal and abstract visuals which involved architecture, structure, precision, space with values we all share as humans. Family, progress, togetherness, growth, and the communal experiences we all have.
It was a great challenge to develop these spaces to showcase all of these messages and yet to keep things interesting and with great aesthetics. Further, all of the visuals had to be in black and white, which makes the challenge great. Adding contrast, working with levels and so on had to be carefully toned to the messaging we wanted to communicate. It all turned out greatly though, with the project evolving into a film.
Many things.
I love lighting and what it causes on pretty much anything. How it can clearly illustrate an environment, add coziness and mood to space or simply dramatize a product so much it makes you think you’re looking at a Rembrandt piece. I truly believe it’s the most important part of a project and we tend to double-down on that.
Consequently, following lighting comes photography. But there’s definitely some further inspiration from different industries.
I, for instance, love music. Hip-hop, particularly. Although that may sound once again generic, I actually enjoy the breakdown of a track going from the easy intros to building up momentum, crescendos and all the way to break down of choruses and so on. And if you take a look at some of our works, it applies to it. Matching clicks and beats on to products being built, the reveal of spaces or final assemblies of something normally match with the sound-track. We really enjoy doing that.
The hardest part of breaking into this industry when I first started was actually breaking into this industry when I started. It’s tough out there, don’t get me wrong. As software get’s simpler, technology faster and abundance of content is out there, it normally becomes more competitive.
It’s hard giving advice given that everyone has different personalities. But as far as going for 3D, visualization, motion and CGI, make sure you develop a taste and aesthetics for what you do.
Again, it may sound generic and abstract but you can have the perfect model with millions of polygons and the perfect highest resolution textures in a physically based shared, but if that isn’t beautifully contextualized and emotionally charged in the final output of that, it will just be valued differently.
Now, if you have your great model nicely placed under fresh and soft lighting in which you’re trying to convey minimalism, or that moody shot with just those couple of rim lights subtly silhouetting perhaps a product or character, revealing but not revealing it too much, that’s a different game. There’s meaning and story being applied to it. A sense of curiosity or simplicity behind. It automatically adds value and people connect with it.
* This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
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