iPhone 17 Air

The iPhone 17 Air is the thinnest iPhone ever made — 5.5mm at its narrowest point, built around a single sheet of aerospace-grade aluminium and a custom silicon architecture. The brief called for a hero animation that could communicate precision at a scale the human eye cannot directly perceive. Still photography cannot convey 5.5mm. Animation can.

We rebuilt the device geometry in Houdini at 1:1 scale. The camera sequence begins at macro — tracing the milled edge profile, the ceramic-glass composite rear panel, the optical module geometry — before pulling back to reveal the full device. We lit it with a single large-format softbox equivalent at a low angle, chosen specifically to produce the long shadow gradient that makes the thinness legible on screen. Colour grading was anchored to Apple's own product photography reference so the animation sat naturally within their existing campaign materials.

The animation ran as the primary hero on the iPhone 17 Air product page at launch and was cut into 15 and 30-second versions for broadcast and paid digital. It remains the most geometrically constrained project we have delivered — tolerances specified to four decimal places.