Coral Stories

Coral Stories is a collaborative project developed under our London based studio, Aura Collective, created as part of our submission to the OFFF Barcelona 2026 open call, a projection mapping commission to be displayed on the Disney Hub. The project explores how nature interacts with human-made artifacts and human-caused natural. The project is planned to be developed further in order to reflect the theme more concretely, therefore the below images reflect the process.

Process

The open call had no set theme, so we each began by developing individual moodboards. A shared thread emerged across them — ocean imagery as a way to explore the tension between the Anthropocene and the natural world. From there we built a shared moodboard, aligning on visual direction, tools, and constraints. Each collaborator then explored their own approach to the theme independently.

Individual Exploration

I firstly explored how to create the oil spill effect in TouchDesigner. Then I wanted to merge this effect with the Blender made coral growth animation.

My approach was to combine an animated Blender coral model with GLSL shaders in TouchDesigner, but the integration proved technically unfeasible within the timeframe. I shifted to working entirely in Blender, and produced a video of corals growing across the concrete walls of the Disney Hub — a visual of nature reclaiming urban space.