Animation Studio Petrick Joins the Masters & Savant Stable
May 23, 2026
After collaborating for 20+ years, designer/directors Cornel Swoboda and Dennis Weyel founded Studio Trench in 2025 and immediately established what the world could expect from them with this riveting Braun spec film.
Cornel Swoboda: “The project began as a tribute to what we consider one of the most precisely engineered consumer objects ever made. The Braun Series 7 razor has quietly endured through genuine design and mechanical rigor, not trend.
“Rather than approaching it as a traditional product spot, we wanted to expose the engineering beneath the surface and treat the razor as a piece of complex machinery worth celebrating in its own right.
“The central creative challenge was restraint. Technical explosions have been done before, and often chewed to death. The Series 7 contains an extraordinary amount of tiny functional detail, but we wanted every part to feel deliberate and believable under extreme scrutiny.
“By turning the model into a flat, almost graphical style, we shifted focus away from the razor’s function and toward the shapes, rhythms, and engineering language within the object itself.”
“To navigate that, we developed a visual language built around three principles: high contrast to isolate form from background, strict symmetry to honor the object’s inherent precision, and an X-ray sensibility that lets the internal mechanics surface without fully giving the game away.
“We knew we wanted minimalist lighting with very few and controlled reflections, and lots of high contrast blacks, allowing the silhouette and internal geometry to do the talking without distraction.
“By turning the model into a flat, almost graphical style, we shifted focus away from the razor’s function and toward the shapes, rhythms, and engineering language within the object itself.
“Because Studio Trench had only just launched, the film became a statement of intent: design-led CG work with a cinematic yet minimalist sensibility, less about advertising an object and more about celebrating the thought and craft behind it.”
Production: Studio Trench
Director/Animator: Cornel Swoboda
Music: Sean Crowley
Toolkit: Cinema 4D, Redshift
