Karen Ayvazovsky · Motion design & creative direction · Yerevan Motion design, direction first.

Nine years making things move. Commercials, product work, titles, loops, and work that leaves the screen for a room. What people come to me for is the idea: what a piece should do, and how to get there. The tools follow from that.

Ten layers, ten years. Move the cursor into the form, then click it.

Yerevan · ··:··
40.1792° N · 44.4991° E

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Practice

01 · What the work is

Method

I am a motion designer and creative director. Most of what I make is film: commercials, product work, titles, idents and loops.

A brief usually arrives as a problem rather than a shot list. The work people come to me for is the answer to it: the idea a piece is built on, and then holding that idea from the first frame through to delivery. Making the creative call and the technical one in the same head is what stops the two drifting apart.

The methods follow the idea. Often that means simulation, built in Houdini, because physics gives motion a weight keyframes do not and a procedural setup can be re-run and re-directed instead of rebuilt. Sometimes it means none of that.

The other half is where I started: taking the work out of the viewport and putting it somewhere physical. On fabric hanging in a hall, on a statue that listens to the crowd, on a stage in time with an ensemble. I trained in architecture before I moved to 3D, and a frame on its own has never quite been enough.

01Motion designCommercials, product work, titles, idents and loops. This is most of the practice and most of the hours.

02Creative directionThe idea a piece is built on, and the look and argument that carry it, held from the brief through to delivery.

03Dynamic FX & simulationCloth, particles, fluid and destruction, built in Houdini. One method among several, and often the right one.

04Look dev & pipelineProcedural setups a team can rerun and art-direct, plus the tooling and specs that keep output consistent.

05Projection mappingMapping onto surfaces that are not flat and do not stay still. Live and pre-rendered.

06InstallationSpatial and sound-reactive work. Objects that respond to the room and the crowd in it.

07TeachingWorkshop curricula and mentoring. Four years of it taught me to explain technical work plainly.

Cinema 4DHoudiniRedshiftAfter EffectsNukeTouchDesignerPhotoshopPythonUnreal Engine

Index of work

10 entries

YearProjectTypeMedium

Watch the breakdown

Featured on LinkedIn

A Houdini FX build for Peacock. The work ran from first look development through to a director’s cut and a full breakdown of how each shot was assembled.

The breakdown shows how the setups were built. Everything is procedural, so between review rounds a shot could be re-run and re-directed instead of rebuilt from scratch every time a note came back.

Client: Peacock
With: Raffi Simonian
Role: Houdini FX, simulation
Built in: Houdini
Delivered: Director’s cut, breakdown
Year: 2026

See the post on LinkedIn

Watch the ident

An ident built on one move. A droplet travels through a cave spring and resolves into the product, and the whole piece is that one transformation held from the first frame to the last. Nothing else happens, which is the point.

The water is simulated in Houdini rather than described by a shader. For a water brand the way the liquid behaves is the entire claim, so it had to be right at every stage: R&D, storyboard, simulation, look dev, final render. Sound design sits underneath and carries more of it than you would expect.

Made at LUT Studios with Michael Martirosyan.

Studio: LUT Studios
With: Michael Martirosyan (QYART)
Role: Concept, 3D, fluid simulation, direction
Built in: Houdini, Cinema 4D, DaVinci Resolve
Sound: Custom sound design
Year: 2026

View on Behance

Watch the site scroll

Lumbra · Light From Shadow, A/002 States

Lumbra builds AI orchestration for intelligence, defence and other high-consequence work. It sits above every other system in the stack, and being wrong there costs something. There was no device to photograph and no dashboard worth showing, so the site needed motion that could carry the product by itself.

A/001 is the homepage hero. The haystack. Petabytes arriving from dozens of sources, unstructured and contradictory. Patterns almost form and then dissolve back into the field. This is the state of things before the platform does anything.

A/002 is the technology page. The needle found. Agents cluster and evaluate, what fails gets caught and corrected against ground truth, and what survives locks into hubs of validated insight with spokes of supporting evidence. The result had to look like constellations rather than a scatter plot.

The brand metaphor is the lunar eclipse, the moment of the diamond ring. Darkness is the default state. Gold only appears where something has passed evaluation, so it never gets used as decoration.

Simulated in Houdini, cached to Alembic, lit and rendered in Cinema 4D, finished in After Effects. 1,355 frames across three delivered cuts including a vertical build for mobile. Ten days from brief to delivery.

Client: Lumbra Incorporated
Studio: LUT Studios
Role: 3D motion, art direction
Pipeline: Houdini → Alembic → Cinema 4D → After Effects
Delivered: 1,355 frames, three cuts
Made in: Ten days
Year: 2026

View on Behance See it live at lumbra.ai

A living statue of wood and cloth. Ambient sound from the crowd and the environment drove its movement and its light in real time, so the object was never the same twice.

Nothing was pre-rendered. The piece had to hold up in a room it had never been in, responding to whatever sound that room happened to make.

Role: Concept, fabrication, systems
Input: Ambient environmental audio
Output: Movement, light
Shown: December 2025

Watch the film

Watch the breakdown

Featured by Greyscalegorilla

A follow-up to the 2023 campaign, rebuilt from scratch. The subject is how a ceramic surface behaves under moving light, animated as simulation so the material actually behaves like material.

Delivered as a film, a 9:16 cut for social, a breakdown, eight isolated object stills and a 4000×4000 master for print. Sound design produced alongside.

Client: 4Ceramics
Role: Concept, 3D, motion, look dev
Formats: Film, 9:16, stills, print master
Extras: Breakdown, sound design
Year: 2025

Watch on Instagram

Watch the piece

A cloth installation suspended in a middle hall, mapped with live projection and synchronised to a live musical performance.

The fabric moved with the room and the projection followed it. That is the whole problem with mapping onto something that will not stay still, and most of the work went into solving it.

Around it, the campaign: a key visual of faces sealed in plastic wrap, and an animated ticket for the night.

Role: Concept, 3D, projection mapping
Setting: Suspended hall installation
Live: Synchronised to live performance
Campaign: Key visual, animated ticket
Year: 2025

The chair

The box

Two self-initiated studies around HAY design objects, made with support from Nera Projects. Nothing is staged around the products. There is nothing in frame except the form, the material and the light moving across it, at the pace a product film needs.

The first film is the box. Two wide scenes and two close studies, rendered as EXR sequences so the grade stayed open right up to the final comp.

The chair came a year later and asked a different question: whether the object could arrive rather than simply be shown. It resolves out of its own geometry and dissolves back into it, animated procedurally rather than keyed, and delivered as a 500-frame sequence so the transition could be graded and retimed without rebuilding it.

Subject: HAY Colour Crate, HAY Soft Edge 56 chair
Type: Self-initiated
Support: Nera Projects
Role: Concept, 3D, motion
Built in: Cinema 4D, Redshift
Delivered: EXR sequences, 500-frame morph
Years: 2024 and 2025

The chair on Instagram The box on Instagram

Watch the film

4Ceramics 2023, Festival poster, vertical

Ceramic surfaces animated as simulation, so the material responds to light and movement instead of being described by a shader alone.

Delivered as square and vertical films plus a still set at A4, square, vertical and a 290cm master. That last one sets the render resolution and the detail budget for everything upstream of it.

Client: 4Ceramics
Event: Ceramics festival, Moscow
Role: Concept, 3D, motion, look dev
Formats: Square, vertical, stills
Print: 290cm master
Year: 2023

Watch on Instagram

Watch the ident

An ident and product film for Flolab’s Surtect phone case, plus a run of motion-design shorts extending the same visual system.

One build, cut to Instagram story and post, YouTube, a website slider, a product module and a homepage module. Six aspect ratios, with and without type, out of a single setup. That only works if the scene is built procedurally from the start.

Client: Flolab
Product: Surtect, iPhone 14 case
Studio: LUT Studios
With: Michael Martirosyan (QYART)
Role: Concept, 3D, motion design
Formats: 1080×1920, 1080×1080, 1920×1080, 1920×750, 950×720, 950×775
Year: 2022

View on Behance

An audio-visual live performance at the Composers Union of Armenia on 5 March 2021, made with Hayk Karoyi and Manukyan Hayk.

Driven live, in time with the players. Live visuals go wrong when they drift out of the music and turn into wallpaper, so most of the work went into making sure that could not happen.

Role: Visual direction, live performance
With: Hayk Karoyi, Manukyan Hayk
Venue: Composers Union of Armenia
Format: Audio-visual live performance
Date: 5 March 2021

Selected entries. Hover a row to find its year in the object. Full archive on Behance.