Thirty Trophies. Five Materials. One Brief. — Observatory Animates the Cannes Lions

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the most prestigious gathering of the global advertising and communications industry — held annually in the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, and owned by Informa plc. When you're asked to animate the trophies that the world's most creative agencies compete to win, the brief carries considerable weight.

For the 2025 festival, Observatory was commissioned by Informa to create a complete suite of 30 trophy animations — one for each Lions category — each rendered across five distinct material types. The result was a library of 150 unique animation assets delivered to the festival's production team for use across ceremony broadcasts, stage screens and branded content throughout the week of the festival.

The Creative Challenge: Material as Meaning

The Cannes Lions trophy is an icon — a golden lion whose form has remained essentially constant since the festival's origins in 1954. Our job was not to redesign it but to animate it in ways that would feel fresh, contemporary and emotionally resonant for each category's moment of presentation.

The five material types we developed allowed the same trophy form to carry entirely different emotional registers — from the warmth and weight of polished gold, to the ethereal quality of glass, to material treatments that evoked more conceptual qualities appropriate to the festival's diverse creative disciplines. Each material state required its own rendering logic, lighting environment and animation rhythm.

Working at the Intersection of Brand and Ceremony

Observatory has significant experience creating content for award ceremonies — the TPi Awards being our most sustained relationship in this space. But the Cannes Lions commission brought a different kind of challenge: working with an iconic brand object, for an audience of the world's most visually sophisticated professionals, in a context where the content itself would be scrutinised as creative work in its own right.

That's exactly the kind of brief we find most compelling. The audience at Cannes Lions doesn't switch off their critical faculties when the ceremony begins. The animation of the trophy needed to be worthy of the trophy itself — and of the extraordinary creative work that had earned it.

A Partnership with Informa Festivals

This commission sits within Observatory's growing relationship with Informa Festivals, which also encompasses our work on the Money 20/20 trophy animation project. Informa's portfolio of global events represents exactly the kind of scaled, high-profile event context in which Observatory's creative and technical capabilities are most valuable.

Source: Observatory project records and Informa commission brief, 2025. Background: Wikipedia — Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity; canneslions.com.