DICE, the music ticketing app making live shows ‘weirdly easy’ asked us to channel that same strange charm into AR and bring their beloved brand mascot ‘the DICE Fan’ to life. The brief? No safe dances, no trend-chasing - just playful, unexpected experiences fans could drop into their world, merging music fan energy and digital weirdness. We answered with two interactive filters, rolled out across TikTok and Instagram.
The first was audio-reactive; a pulsing, shape-shifting DICE Fan that responded to any track selected in-app. As the music played, its body inflated and its eyes would pop.
The second experience let fans build out their own surreal gig scene. With every tap, more moshing DICE Fans appeared, in a pocket-sized frenzy. The more you tapped, the weirder it got.
Each filter was tailored natively for TikTok and Instagram, optimised to perform, behave, and delight exactly as intended on both platforms. The result? A suite of filters that feel less like content and more like characters and a brand brought to life in a way users could truly enjoy engaging and playing with.
This visual sequence maps out the user flow for the crowd builder AR filter designed for DICE. The DICE crowd filter lets users populate their space with a growing crew of DICE Fans, each one vibing in their own weird little way. Just tap to build your own surreal gig scene, straight from your living room floor and apply any in-app music track you like.
Explorations in movement for the DICE Fan mascot, testing how far we could stretch (literally) the character’s personality through dance. These early animation loops helped define the tone: silly, expressive, and just the right amount of unhinged. Each test pushes the Fan’s proportions, timing, and eye-driven charm to see what kinds of rhythm, bounce, and weirdness we could build into its idle behaviours.
From stutter steps to awkward bops, these motions informed the final AR filter animations; designed to be reactive, ridiculous, and impossible to take seriously (in the best way).
A series of early rig tests on the character model optimised for AR, exploring the physical language of the DICE Fan mascot. From stretchable limbs to eye distortions and off-kilter silhouettes, each pose pushes the character into stranger, more expressive territory. These tests helped define the Fan’s movement logic; goofy, unpredictable, and full of elastic charm, laying the foundation for how it dances, reacts, and misbehaves in AR.
These concept studies explored how the DICE Fan’s color and 3D textures could visually transform in response to music. Each skin was designed to react dynamically in real time, from waveform distortions and reactive shader patterns.
While these looks pushed the boundaries of responsiveness, the final creative direction returned to DICE’s iconic all-black Fan.
As the DICE Fan’s most prominent feature, the eyes do all the heavy lifting. With no mouth, arms, or eyebrows, expression lives entirely in their shape, position, and rhythm. This sheet explores a range of emotional tones, from curious and confused to spaced-out and mischievous, using only simple eye tweaks to communicate feeling.
These sketches pushed the boundaries of what the DICE Fan could become when reacting to music. If sound could stretch a limb, twist a body, or pop an eyeball clean off, what would that look like?
We explored everything from subtle squash-and-stretch to full character morphs: fans with noodle limbs, spiky silhouettes, googly-eyed mutants, and squiggly concert creatures. Each form tested how energy levels could physically reshape the Fan, capturing a sense of movement that felt more emotional than literal.
These explorations helped us find the sweet spot between recognizability and reactive absurdity, giving the Fan just enough flexibility to feel alive, without ever losing its iconic charm.