Loop is a creative agency based in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2025, Nick Gallo (CEO) asked me to do some visual development for the studio itself. I had the monumental task of bringing the Loop bear, their mascot, into the 3D world to use in animated promo material for the agency.

The Loop bear.

You might think, "monumental? what's sooooooo hard about making a bear?" He's not just any bear. He's an extremely specific bear. Eyes a little too far apart? That's a whole different bear.

He didn't just have to be the same bear as the logo at a glance. He had to make sense in 3D space from every angle. He had to be expressive, versatile, friendly and cool. All without speaking and in segments of just a few seconds long. He also has very tiny limbs 😭

The first animation test I did with the model, to announce an award. Sound design by Jon Ryan

I learned very quickly that leaving the bear smooth green with no blue outline made the bear unrecognizable. To solve this, I used Cinema4D's sketch and toon renderer to draw rough lines around the bear and the inner ear.

Once I felt comfortable animating the bear, it was time to make the places in brooklyn where he'd hang out. I moved on to making elements of the city: homes, subway trains, subway stations, fire hydrants, etc.

My first attempt at putting the bear in a real environment.

Rather than making a realistic environment and risk it feeling uncanny, I wanted the environments to feel part of the "Loop universe." The simplest way to do that was restricting the color palette to brand colors. Using mostly blues would allow the bright green of the bear to really pop. The 4 colors wouldn't have enough range to pull this off, so I expanded it.

Loop's brand colors

The expanded palette

The first real test of the bear would be for Loop's new sizzle reel, which would live on their homepage and be used to pitch the agency to potential clients. They originally asked me to just animate some title cards, but I saw it as an opening to get the bear on his first job.

The opening sequence for the sizzle reel. Editing/sound by Jon Ryan

I wanted the bear to have a really impactful opening so I literally had him impact a wall. Right off the bat you know he's not just a squishy teddy bear.

For the opening title cards themselves, I played off of the wheat pasted posters you see scattered all over Brooklyn on walls and scaffolding. Loop has an established visual identity around.. vandalism, so it made sense to utilize that here.

The title card transitions for later sections of the sizzle reel

Shifting gears completely, Nick later asked me to design an arcade cabinet for housing Loop: The Game.

A 3D mockup of the arcade cabinet. In the game, the Loop bear slaps stickers on things around the city while being chased by the cops.

Rather than use the bear model from the sizzle reel, I wanted to make a new unique vector illustration of the bear to better match the vibe of old arcade machines like DigDug, Centipede, and Donkey Kong Jr.

I chose to use a really intense perspective to make it feel dynamic, to frame the bear bigger than anything else, and because arcade cabinets are a really weird shape.

The console. I illustrated the bear "playing" the game to demonstrate and label the available controls.

Huge thanks to Nick for asking me to work on this, and Jon Ryan for working with me on editing the sizzle!