Case study · 2026
FOLD
FOLD is a mountain film festival we made up to prove one thing: a website can feel like a paper diorama. Mountains cut from paper, a hot-air balloon that travels the whole page with you, and a dawn that only breaks at the very bottom.
- Client
- FOLD (concept)
- Location
- Antwerpen, BE
- Year
- 2026
- What we did
- Concept & art directionAI imageryWebGLDevelopment
- Built with
- React · Vite · Three.js · GSAP · Lenis
01 · The idea
A festival that doesn't exist
No client, no brief. We invented a four-day festival of mountain films screened at 1,850 metres, and built its world out of layered paper: a dusk palette from plum to apricot, an Instrument Serif headline with one italic accent, and a lot of restraint — one line, one sentence, one button.
02 · The technique
A real shadow box in the browser
The hero isn't a flat image: it's a WebGL scene with four planes at their own depth — a sky video at the back, paper ridges in front — and fake paper shadows between them. The camera moves with your mouse and with your scroll, so the mountains shift against each other like a real diorama.
Below 1024px or on touch the same scene falls back to pure CSS layers, so phones get the look without the GPU bill. The balloon is a fixed element that follows a smooth curve through ten waypoints across the entire page, from the hero to the foot of the footer.
03 · The imagery
Generated first, then cut out
Every ridge, cloud and balloon was generated in our own image pipeline on a flat magenta background and keyed out, so each piece is a clean paper cut-out we can stack at any depth. The mist between sections is real transparency, not a white gradient.
The page ends in a dawn: a paper sun rises behind a pine forest, then the site closes on ink-blue night paper with stars, a moon and the balloon landing in a clearing.
4
paper layers at their own depth in the WebGL hero
10
waypoints the balloon travels across the page
17
generated images, keyed and cut by hand
See for yourself
This site is live
Have a look around. This is exactly what we delivered.
fold-hti-software.vercel.app
