Ondata
Client
Ondata Festival
Year
2025
Role
Motion identity, art direction, stage visuals
Discipline
Motion
A motion identity for an electronic music festival on the Adriatic, built from a single liquid wave that bends to the music on every screen.
01 — Context
Ondata is a three-day electronic music festival on a stretch of beach in the Marche, now in its sixth year. It had outgrown its first identity, a sunset gradient that looked like every other summer festival on the coast.
The organizers came to me with a new main stage, a bigger LED budget and one wish: an identity people would recognize from across the beach at 2 a.m.
02 — Challenge
A festival identity lives mostly in motion: on stage screens, in reels, on a phone held up in the crowd. It also has to hold up as a still on a wristband or a tote bag.
We needed one form that could do both. It had to run live at 60 frames per second behind the DJs and survive being printed in two colors on cotton.
03 — Process
We started with water, filming the Adriatic at dawn and tracing how a single wave folds over itself. In Houdini we rebuilt that motion as a chrome ribbon, a liquid surface that picks up whatever color sits behind it.
Then we wired it to sound. Low frequencies lift the crest, highs ripple the surface, and each stage gets its own tempo range. We tested the rig over two nights at a club in Bologna before locking a single set of parameters for the festival.
04 — Solution
The system is one wave, two colors and one extra-wide typeface. Deep ultramarine holds the night and acid lime carries every piece of information. Posters use frozen frames pulled from the live render, so no two in the series are the same.
On site, the same real-time file drives the main-stage LED wall, the entrance arch and the social cutdowns. For merch we flattened the form into a single lime line that prints cleanly on wristbands, totes and tickets.
05 — Outcome
The 2025 edition sold out five weeks early, with 42,000 visitors over three days. Clips of the stage visuals passed 3.1 million views, and the wave stays for 2026.
In numbers
42k
Visitors over three days
3.1M
Views on stage clips
120
Poster frames from one render
Credits
Creative direction & motion
Mara Ellis
3D & real-time
Luca Ferretti
Sound-reactive development
Nadia Rossi
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