For many of us, the word revenant—meaning a person who has returned, especially from the dead—conjures up the image of Leonardo DiCaprio trudging through snowy wastes, battling the elements and assorted challenges to survive. Glasgow-based creative studio Revenant has the same name: a coincidence, but an oddly fitting one. Creating cinematics, trailers, short films, visual design, interface technology, ad campaigns and promotions for a broad range of clients commissioning themed entertainment, motion design, branding, experiential, film and gaming, the motion graphics studio, which was formed in 2011 as PlayDead, saw a shift in 2017; cofounder Johnny Harris took a break to explore the wild natural beauty of Patagonia and got so hooked on the great outdoors that he decided to leave the world of visual effects behind him. Fellow cofounder Kev McCrae registered the name Revenant because, as he recalls, “I had it in the back of my mind that Johnny might possibly not come back.” But the name wasn’t applied until 2022 when the devastating effects of COVID necessitated another studio shift that underscored how prescient McCrae was in registering such an appropriate name.
creative director.
But then, McCrae’s creative journey has exhibited prescience ever since it began around the pivotal turn of the 21st century. The arrival of desktop publishing and tools such as Flash enabled designers like David Carson and digital artists like Nando Costa to experiment with new art forms that would have been impossible just a few years earlier. Unsurprisingly, McCrae has cited both as inspirational figures ever since he worked his way through graphic design degrees and a masters in screen design at what was then one of just two universities offering it in the United Kindgom.
Acknowledging his early interest in the fledgling motion and visual effects field, McCrae is still passionate about the graphic design path that took him into it: “Graphic design is a great foundation for the work we do because it gives you an eye for detail and makes you think about how a viewer reads the screen,” he says. “A lot of people don’t have that. They’ve got skills in Houdini or Maya, which is great, but if they can’t communicate a message or think about how a viewer reads the screen, then the most beautiful graphics, visual effects or animation in the world will be meaningless.”
McCrae’s carefully chosen educational path catapulted the young designer into the heart of the UK motion design industry, first in London and then back in his home country of Scotland, where he met Harris and formed PlayDead in 2011. Fast forward to 2022, the studio’s broadcast work was “falling off a COVID cliff,” as McCrae says. He turned to his friends at game production company Axis Studios to ask whether they had any work the studio could support within the games sphere. “The company was working on the action role-playing game Dead Island 2 with publisher Deep Silver, who was looking for something a bit tongue-in-cheek, a highend sort of Netflix title sequence,” he explains. “With our background
in graphic design, VFX and a lot of title sequences for broadcast clients, we came up with some ideas that led us to games. It felt like a natural evolution.”
Looking at the breadth and quality of Revenant’s work since, it’s clear how natural the move into games was—and no more so than on the metaverse blockchain game Iron Sail. Beginning as a website identity for Whydah, a developer of multiple mobile games, the project turned into an enigmatic, brooding and thrilling cinematic CG trailer for seven games under its umbrella. “We created seven planets and a spaceship, which looked a bit like a ship within the trailer, with the logline ‘Sail the seven galactic seas,’ and because we were given so much creative freedom with it, we went to town,” enthuses McCrae. “The client absolutely loved it.” The project attracted huge recognition, winning more awards than any other project Revenant had ever done, which in turn led to a Valorant trailer for video game developer Riot Games. “And it just sort of snowballed from there,” McCrae says.
Graphic design is a great foundation for the work we do because it gives you an eye for detail and makes you think about how a viewer reads the screen.” —Kev McCrae
One of the most arresting attributes of Revenant is its ability to create real diversity in its projects. “The Orkney Memorial Experience,” an animated film commissioned by the Kirkwall Townscape Heritage Initiative for the centenary of the First World War armistice, uses elegantly realized monochrome woodcut-style animation for an experience which is as unique as it is moving. In “Yeo’s Journey,” an absorbing, narrative-led series of animations are projected onto a system of caves to create a wide-eyed-in-wonder experience. The trailer for Valorant delved deep into making oni masks and ceremonial swords. A VFX package for the documentary Apollo Thirteen: Survival combines CG animation, high-level compositing, NASA archive footage and effects to create a thrilling introduction to the gripping story of the Apollo moon mission. And “The Pony Express,” the first step toward a proof of concept for a new animated feature, introduces the captivating Iridescence, known as “Iri”—small, insect-like creatures whose motion is as beguiling as their execution is assured. Each aforementioned work is distinct from its stablemates with very different user experiences—something McCrae is justifiably proud of. “Every Revenant project is completely unique and bespoke, tailored for that specific project and client,” he says.
That said, the studio’s output—particularly in areas like gaming, where sci-fi tropes lend themselves to quite dark themes and worlds—does have a visible aesthetic. “People say we’ve got an identity or that they recognize a project as a Revenant project,” says McCrae. “I’ve never really seen that myself. I had one bit of feedback from a friend who said, ‘You know, we were considering you for this meta project, but it felt too light, and your work is too dark; you might want to think about diversifying your work and showcasing different styles.’ And I immediately thought, ‘Yeah, maybe we need to do that.’ But then the more I thought about it, it’s nice that Revenant has its own identity and that people recognize us for the work that we do and the styles we produce.”
One glorious departure from the darkness is the gorgeous, brightly diverse world of Everhaven, a multiplayer sandbox action-adventure game by Phoenix Labs. It was sadly unreleased, but the work Revenant did on it won an NYX Award last year for its startlingly original design incorporating a vibrant, saturated world of wonder and joy. “It was a beautiful project with a beautiful team, not just on our side but on the client’s, too,” says McCrae. “Their vision was very pure and apparent, and the animatics and storyboards they gave us were very, very clear, leaving us free to just focus on the beauty, emotion and characters.”
The awards have piled up since. In November of 2024, Revenant’s work on Future Genesis, commissioned by Kamp Grizzly as a revival of a 1992 brand campaign for sports brand Oakley, became the studio’s most awarded project ever. Again, McCrae credits the client alongside his team for its success. “It was our biggest-budget project, we had a great timeline with it and the client was really on board,” he explains. “We were realistic in terms of what we could achieve within the size we were at the time, and it was a massive learning curve. But everyone in the studio was just on fire; they knocked it out of the park.”
The size of the studio helps in other ways, too: “We can pivot in different directions, rather than being restricted to just doing games, for example, or just doing brand work,” McCrae explains. In terms of process, Revenant is set up as four main teams within the studio—a production team, motion design team, pre-rendering team and real-time team—all working across multiple projects, usually simultaneously and interlinked based on the work, be it broadcast, brand, games work, architectural visualization “and whatever it is that sort of crosses our path,” he says.
We are all about authenticity and imperfections because that is what’s going to make the worlds we create more believable, more human and more considered.” —Kev McCrae
One recent project commissioned by client Thinkwell as a cinematic trailer for a gaming and esport district in Qiddiya City, near Riyadh, encompassed a range of these, incorporating entertainment and branding. Like all of Revenant’s work, it’s a strongly emotive piece with a very real feel, including imperfections and glitches. How do McCrae and his teams achieve this aesthetic? “We are all about authenticity and imperfections,” he says, “because that is what’s going to make the worlds we create more believable, more human and more considered. We always say the devil is in the details—in little moments like taking the motion capture data from a shoot, then giving it extra details like imperfections, which AI would never do. It’s those moments that make something believable, more personal and more resonant with people.”
McCrae feels the desire for authenticity will shape not just communication arts in the future but our actual future. “People are going to want to simplify things rather than be overly complex,” he says. “I think more and more of us are going to switch off more from social media because it’s going to get so diluted and saturated that people will want to feel the real world—have real textures, materials, conversations and connections. I think there’s going to be a desire for more analog techniques and that the future is going to be more about human relationships rather than artificial intelligence.”
In Revenant’s sphere of work, AI is clearly one of the biggest challenges, but for McCrae, equally urgent is “understanding the viewer, the interpretation and the purpose, as well as thinking about highly conceptual ideas that are really going to stand out,” he says. “It’s all those elements combined that are going to set us apart.”
McCrae says he’d “love to be able to do something of a longer format, something purely beautiful, original, inventive and creative—but with meaning. Something that encapsulates everything the studio could possibly do with all the experience, knowledge and skills the team has. So, if anyone would like to give us some money to be able to do that, that would be fantastic.” ca
