Soft Transformations –
in collaboration with ByteDance

Soft Transformations captures the process of tea making through a contemporary lens, focusing on how dried tea leaves and flowers shift in form, color, and temperature as they brew. While tea traditions are deeply rooted in different cultures, this project reinterprets the process using natural and new materials to create hybrid tea mixtures, thereby establishing a dialogue between heritage and modernity.

Dreamina-generated visuals accompany each brewing step, visualizing the sensory and emotional worlds that tea can evoke. As aromas deepen and shapes expand, the act of brewing tea becomes a time for imagination. Calming and therapeutic for some, nostalgic for others. The transformations of the tea mirror the soft transformations within ourselves over time.

The visual development of Soft Transformations began with creating a storyboard and moodboard, which defined the emotional progression, pacing, color shifts, and material references for each stage of the brewing process. Based on this foundation, I carried out the prompt engineering in Dreamina, crafting and refining prompts to translate sensory qualities such as warmth, diffusion, and softness into atmospheric visuals. The final video was produced in Adobe After Effects, where the generated visuals were sequenced and animated into a continuous narrative that unfolds in parallel with the transformation of the tea.