Tim Schöndorfer

Tender Hearts

What to do if you fall in love with a romance robot

In this eight episode romantic comedy series a woman falls in love with a companion bot, built by the robotics startup Tender Hearts.
My main task for this project was to design a branding system for this fictional company and build the internal user interfaces for all the devices, staff and users interact with on screen and often in camera.

Responsibilities

Branding, User Interface Design, Motion Design, Building Interactive Interfaces

Collaborators

Jonathan Ibeka, Niels Reinhardt, Lisa Faustmann

If you're in a rush - watch this.
Actually... also watch this if you're not in a rush.

The Brand

The Style

For the director Pola Beck it was important, that the interfaces didn't force themselves into the viewers attention, but were more like an extension of the warm, low contrast and tactile style of the whole show.
The goal was to make them look more like something displayed on paper than on digital screens.

All the information shown was to be kept minimal, without flourishes and always serving the story. Main goal was for the viewer to always know immediately what kind of information was displayed.

So many tablets

For Tender Hearts employees, the main tool of interfacing with the companies operating system is via tablet. This is just a small selection of the designs.

A lot of screens

Those screens are background fillers for shots in the Tender Hearts Headquarters. They were used on large curved monitors.

On set Interactivity

The production team wanted to capture as much of the device interactions in camera. To make this possible I developed a web app to run on the company tablets. That made it easy for the actors to scroll, select, view content or even make notes on the screens.

By integrating dedicated buttons for various key colours on the home screen, a blue, green or grey fullscreen for inserts is always just a click away.