Gantri: Two Months of Light Worlds

Client

GantriDesigner lighting, 3D printed to order in California

The brief

Run our socialFor two months, between creative teams

When

January to February 2026Two months of the feed

Output

34 filmsPlus dozens of stills

Worlds

ThirteenA new one every few days

Format

VerticalMade for the feed

Gantri was between creative teams, and a feed full of beautiful lamps can’t go dark. So for two months they handed RIOT the keys. We came back with thirteen worlds.

Gantri makes lighting the way nobody else does. Every lamp is printed to order in California from plant-based polymers, and every design comes from an independent creator who keeps their name on it. That makes each lamp a small object with a big personality, and a personality needs to shine. A catalog shot on white was never going to cut it.

So we set ourselves one rule for the two months: no world twice. January went cold and close: macro landscapes, a morning in the snow and a toy-box-inspired lamp that came to life. February warmed up into colour, play, floating lamps and love letters. Thirty-four films and dozens of stills, every one cut vertical for the feed and every one built from scratch at our studio, or out in the wild.

It started with a delivery: a wall of Gantri boxes landing at the studio, every one a world waiting to be built.

January: winter light

Macro vignettes

Get close enough and a lamp stops being a lamp. The ripples of Stack turn into dunes, the inside of Encore becomes a horizon, the curve of Cerra rises like the sun. We shot the first vignettes tight enough to lose every edge, then let the light carry the story. In Lift-off, Stack turns into a rocket on the launch pad: three, two, one, and the lamp takes off.

Light and shadow

Cerra, by Bradley L Bowers, takes its shape from a flower opening to the sun. We set it turning slowly in the dark and made the shadow the subject.

The toy box

Chris Granneberg built the Analog Task Light from stacked ten-centimetre cubes, inspired by his daughter’s Lego. A lamp that started as a toy deserved to be played with, so it became a slot machine, a light-up robot, a spinning crew and a lamp that turns one degree at a time. Tabletop animation with a gloved hand in frame, because toys should look touched.

Still life

And one quiet piece to close the month: a monochromatic still life, built in a single colour, slow enough to breathe.

Snow day

One January shoot was planned as a studio day. Then, on the drive in, it started to snow, and somewhere between the car and the studio door the plan changed. Snow Day became a whole day of it: the real thing in the morning, and our own version by the afternoon.

Morning: Eagle Rock

We packed up the lamps and a portable power bank and headed for Eagle Rock Reservation in New Jersey to brave the morning outside. There’s no wall socket on a wooded ridge, so every lamp in these films is running off that battery: Arpeggio, PyraSphere, Cerra, Encore and Stack, glowing warm among bare trees and fresh drifts while the snow kept falling.

Afternoon: the studio

By the afternoon we’d brought the snow inside. Back at the studio we built our own winter from two or three different kinds of fake snow. PyraSphere rises like a moon over the drifts, with Encore and Stack taking their turn in the flurries.

February: colour, play and love

Macro, in colour

The February vignettes moved into colour. Maskor glows on a rough block of concrete against deep red, and the slim stems of Gio vanish into the dark until only the light is left.

Antigravity

Lamps don’t float. Ours did, and there’s no CGI in it. Antigravity looks like something rendered at first glance, but every frame is real and done in camera: we physically threw the lamps through the air in front of a run of coloured backdrops, with crash mats waiting below, and caught them mid-flight. Count down, throw, shoot, repeat. The film below keeps the countdown in, so you can see exactly how it was made.

A city of lamps

Next we built a miniature city: a plaza of plinths and breeze blocks, populated entirely by Gantri lights, with a sky we could change at will. Midnight blue, forest green, ultraviolet. A whole collection in one frame, every lamp in conversation with the next.

Scenic

Fold, by Teixeira Design Studio, was inspired by folding a single sheet of paper. We gave it a stage worthy of a sculpture: a glossy red lounge chair, a plant, a shelf of breeze blocks and a backdrop green enough to make the red sing.

Valentine’s

For Valentine’s we wrote love letters. Three films, three ways of saying it: typed, handwritten and crafted. A lamp on the desk, a card in its light.

Screenshot your colour

Gantri lights come in 25 colours, so we turned choosing one into a game. Each film cycles through the palette; screenshot to keep the one that’s yours. We made a whole run of them, with Cora, Drops and Fold each taking a turn.

Hand animated

And because winter wasn’t quite finished with us, a snowboarder carving a line down the shade of Ursa Minor, hand animated frame by frame by our art director, Rose Hidalgo. Rose drew a quieter world too: a cosy room, a sleeping dog and a Gantri lamp keeping watch.

Two months, thirteen worlds.

Macro and miniature, studio and snowfield, live action and animation, seasonal moments and a game the audience could play. In eight weeks the Gantri feed went from a product catalog to an atlas, and every world in it was imagined, built, lit, shot and cut by RIOT.

Lay all thirteen worlds side by side and they turn into a palette: the navy of a snowfield at night with PyraSphere glowing cream against it, the amber inside Stack, Maskor’s deep red, Fold’s coral, a sweep of ultraviolet and violet, a quiet run of sage and cobalt, Valentine’s blush, and Gantri’s own green holding it all together. None of that was left to chance: we hand-picked which lamps to feature and which of their colourways to shoot, so each world could tell its story through colour. Every swatch below was sampled straight from the work.

ServicesSocial Content Creation·Social Videos·Product Photography·Art Direction·Set Design·Motion Design