It was this disconnect between the commonly attributed emotional language of CellAg and the corresponding non-emotional imagery that motivated us to transform the narrative and urge our industry partners to tackle the challenge similarly. This was the first element that led to creating CAS Vision, an artistic representation of our mantra at CAS: For the People. For the Animals. For the World. It also provided the spark for CAS to fully dive into the creative world of cellular agriculture for years to come.

The second element that inspired our action was discovered in considering how a leader in cellular agriculture education, a role we found ourselves increasingly occupying over the years, should communicate such a novel concept. More specifically, how CAS should communicate CellAg through our organization's most frequently used information channel, the conduit where the highest quantity of people will discover both us and the greater field of cellular agriculture for the first time, the internet.

We see our website as not only a home for CAS, but also the home for a vision: one for the concept of cellular agriculture which holds so much promise for the people, the animals, and the world. And over time, as we came into the position of serving as the internet’s global hub for cellular agriculture, we felt a strong responsibility to make the experience any visitor has with our website an unforgettable one. This, of course, starts with the introduction to CellAg.org.

When it came to that initial interfacing between CAS and internet visitors, the topic of imagery instantly arises. While featuring someone holding a petri dish with meat inside may seem to describe the “how” behind cellular agriculture, or the scientific basis of the concept, we sought to create a visual that would summarize the “why” behind the aforementioned strong descriptions that CellAg so often receives. In other words, we felt the cellular agriculture space needed a visual that was as dramatic as those impassioned characterizations that people so often award the concept.

When we originally launched in 2018, we wanted any user’s first impression of cellular agriculture and CAS to be powerful. We built our homepage, specifically our hero image (the first image, front and center on a website) around the visual portrayal of our slogan: For the People. For the Animals. For the World.

As we began to develop the CAS 2020 Relaunched Website, we sought to evolve this visualization to match how CAS was evolving. The goal was to create a looping, motion-based sequence that identified with our slogan just as our first hero image did, but taken to the next level. So, we created a visual that could tell the right story about cellular agriculture and our work at CAS for 2020 and onward; a visual that would inspire hope for those unfamiliar with the concept we represent, as well as give a sense of reassurance for those who are familiar with us already. And lastly, it needed to hint at what was ahead for us at CAS, transitioning our work into the creative domains of design and video. All of this translated into the making of CAS Vision.

While incorporating the CAS Slogan, #PeopleAnimalsWorld, was salient, we held to our principles of purposefully omitting language out of the scene; we felt anything more than an instrumental musical piece would be unfitting since the prospects of cellular agriculture that the visual signifies are global in scale and not limited to any culture or region of the world. Instead, we sought to symbolize the slogan through the background city, Project CMF, a Hyperloop system (People), the cows (Animals), and the environment (World) encompassing it all. With regards to color, the project progressed towards a warmer, more sophisticated color palette over subsequent iterations. Ultimately the lighting and fog (symbolizing the commonly referred to home for CellAg, as well as CAS, San Francisco) influenced the color of the eventual final artwork as well.

While our previous website's homepage stood as the most significant creative inspiration for CAS Vision, we would be remiss to not reflect on other pieces that lent certain creative elements to the final artwork. There were a multitude of key creative starting points within the film and video game industries, all of which converged as inspiration towards the final artistic achievement.

Ori & the Blind Forest (top left), was the first of these, specifically, the effect where leaves wistfully blow in the wind, as well as the natural color palette and serene mood conveyed in their Main Menu. A scene from Frozen 2 (top right) illustrates an outlook upon a grand landscape from higher ground which mimicked the positioning of our two primary cow subjects. Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker (bottom left) features an epic scene with large environmental scale, atmospheric fog, and palpable solemnity which was also a creative spark for CAS Vision. And lastly, Unity’s real-time cinematic short film utilizing ray-tracing, The Heretic (bottom right), features a foreground character walking towards the horizon, positioned away from the camera’s perspective; what we aimed to reflectively achieve in our work was the effect of the backlit character, hiding a bit of the lost fidelity in the 3D models when optimizing the clip, a necessary visual tradeoff for displaying the artwork on our website. Lastly, it’s noteworthy that these 4 inspirations share an important sense of gravitas that pulls together the scene, audiovisually. And while varying in depth and degree, this is also an area we sought to incorporate into CAS Vision.

It goes without saying, that inspiration and ideation are nothing without capable individuals to drive them to fruition. We worked closely with award-winning teams, WOVE Collective and monopo, through a creative process spanning Q2 & Q3 2019 to create the unique visual that would ultimately define the CAS Website and our future direction in cellular agriculture. CAS Vision was concluded in the Fall of 2019 and is featured as the primary hero visual on our website, social media, and the CAStore.

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  Concept Ideation & Creative Strategy

  Kristopher Gasteratos

  Kristopher is the Founder, Creative Director, and President at CAS (The Cellular Agriculture Society). He is the visionary behind a multitude of pioneering projects in the cellular agriculture space, including the Harvard & Stanford-profiled 90 Reasons and Project CMF.
  
  His efforts have helped to establish the field of cellular agriculture over the last decade, having been featured and quoted in the Financial Times, Washington Post, Science, Harvard Innovation Lab, MIT Tech Review, Meat Science, Forbes, and has developed collaborations between CAS and the UN, Harvard, Stanford, Elsevier, and Google.

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  Visual Design

  WOVE Collective

  WOVE is an art and design studio based in Toronto, Canada with clientele including Apple, Nike, Universal Music, and Sony. They were founded by current Creative Director, Quentin Deronzier, who led the visual design of CAS Vision.
  
  Driven to create captivating visual experiences, WOVE collaborates with artists and brands from around the world. They primarily direct their efforts in the creation of show/event visuals, art installations, artistically-driven commercial projects, music videos, and album art.

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  Project Management & Creative Strategy

  Mattijs Devroedt

  Mattijs is the Manager Director at monopo. Based in London and Tokyo-born, monopo is a creative agency that delivers design-driven solutions through digital experiences, branding, advertising and video production. Mattijs’ position as Manager Director includes a multitude of roles, including but not limited to project management, creative strategy, and copywriting.
  
  He started his career as an advertising strategist in Belgium and moved to London in 2012 to join Ogilvy and later adam&eveDDB. In 2016, Mattijs joined Wieden+Kennedy in Tokyo where he has helped brands like Nike, IKEA, Audi, and Airbnb find their feet in the Japanese and Korean markets as Strategic Planning Director.

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  Project Management & Creative Strategy

  Mélanie Hubert-Crozet

  Mélanie is the Creative & Art Director at monopo. Based in London and Tokyo-born, monopo is a creative agency that delivers design-driven solutions through digital experiences, branding, advertising and video production. Mélanie’s role as Creative & Art Director encompasses various responsibilities, but most prominently, she leads and manages all of monopo London's design initiatives.
  
  She is a Gobelins graduate who has worked at leading digital agencies, UNIT9 and HUGE, in London before joining monopo in 2016. There she has played a central role in the internationalization of the agency, resulting in global business growth and a string of awards.