Balenciaga has released its Fall 2021 fashion collection in the form of a video game, which sees players travel through a wonderland-style future world, passing avatars dressed in ripped jeans and metal-armour boots on the way. The Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow video game is structured in five different levels, or "zones", which the player simply has to walk through, following a predetermined path of glowing arrows.

You can watch a consolidated edit of all the cinematic sequences we animated for this project in the video player above.

The interactive experience is offline now. An archival screen recording of the full game can be looked at in the player below. This project was a collaboration with Balenciaga Fashion Show Agency Substance & Inhalt.

The project was featured on the New York Times, The Verge, Vogue and Hypebeast.

The levels of the game are being interrupted by 9 cut-scene cinematic sequences that Builders Club animated and produced. We used various state-of-the-art tools such as Unreal Engine, Houdini and Cinema4d to craft the films on the highest possible standard. The scenes feature 3d volumetric scans of models showing Balenciaga’s looks.

The journey starts out in a Balenciaga retail store, before players exit onto a city street and hop onto a bus, which takes flight and warps into thin air. Participants are then transported to another outdoor environment where they are directed through a series of abandoned concrete structures, and towards a dark forest opening. A white rabbit leads players through the forest to a “secret rave”.
Upon leaving the forest, players traverse upward steps through winding caves to the top of a rocky cliff, where an avatar dressed in knight’s armour pulls a sword from a stone. This action seems to explode the rockface to reveal an opening to a red-rock mountain, which the player is directed to walk over until they reach a sunset, where the game closes.