La LlamaLa Llama

La Llama (The Flame) is an animated short film celebrating Spanish design and architecture, directed by Turbo, the duo of Pau López and Gerardo del Hierro. White Horse and Apartamento produced it for ICEX's Where Talent Ignites campaign, with animation by The Post Office and character design by Jaime Hayon.

Il Giardinetto

Il Giardinetto is an Italian restaurant and a Barcelona design landmark. Photographer Leopoldo Pomés opened it in 1974, commissioning architects Federico Correa and Alfonso Milá to create an interior inspired by the chestnut gardens of southern France. The design won the FAD Interior Design Award that same year, and the restaurant became a meeting place for the city's artists, architects and designers.

The restaurant’s chairs become animated performers, with their shapes and movement driving the scene.

Trailer

The Complete Film

A character moves through a house that keeps changing, passing through settings drawn from Spanish design and architecture.

The campaign presented the film in Cannes on May 17, 2026. Later coverage in shots singled out the animated chairs, while STASH featured the film and its creative team.

Screening 2026

Where Talent Ignites presentation at Cannes ↗Cannes, France • May 17, 2026

Il Giardinetto References

Reference photographs of Il Giardinetto’s interior, furniture and architectural details.

Developing Il Giardinetto

I illustrated and designed the Il Giardinetto setting with The Post Office, drawing on the restaurant’s interior and iconic Spanish design. I also developed the chairs and their movement.

Generative studies explored variations in the restaurant’s space, color and texture.

I used ComfyUI to explore extensions of the restaurant interior and painted treatments, developing the look of the setting before the final Houdini sequence.

From Chair Studies to Moving Objects

Chair studies explored the forms from several angles and tested different surface treatments. Image-to-3D experiments and retopology helped develop the production models. In Houdini, I built a reusable APEX rigging setup and adapted it to the different chair shapes, creating a custom rig where a chair needed a different approach.

Animation Development

Animation studies show how I refined the staging and movement, from initial blocking to the finished rendered composites.

I animated the APEX chair rigs using a scripted, procedural workflow. Solaris Stage handled scene assembly and rendering; Copernicus handled image processing, compositing and export. The sequence's 3D execution, including post-processing and compositing, stayed in Houdini.

Poster

Links

Credits

The Il Giardinetto work brought together illustration, design and Houdini animation. The official film credit lists me as a 3D Artist alongside Carlos Neda, Borja Alegre and Bernat Martínez. The wider team credits below follow the official campaign page; its complete credit roll also includes the participating artists, freefall sequence, production support and design objects.