Editor’s note: This is the first article in a four-part series of conversations recorded at OFFF Barcelona 2026, where Tim Thompson of RevThink sat down with some of the most singular creative minds on this year’s speaker roster. We begin with a director whose career reads like a secret history of Motion Design itself. What follows is Tim’s account of the conversation.
If you have watched a title sequence in the last fifteen years and felt your pulse change, there is a decent chance Onur Senturk had something to do with it. Turkish born and now based in London, Senturk works as an independent director and designer for hire, moving between films, commercials, and game trailers for clients all over the world. He has collaborated with Territory Studio, Riot Games, Revenant, PostPanic, and Blur Studio, where he worked on the opening titles for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo under creative director Tim Miller.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opening titles, Blur Studio
That pedigree runs deep. His hands are on the main titles for The Raven and Captive, work that established him as one of the field’s most distinctive sequence designers before he ever called himself a director. But sit with him for forty-five minutes, as I did at the Disseny Hub in Barcelona, and you quickly learn that the credits are almost beside the point. Our conversation could have been about tools, pipelines, or AI. Instead it kept returning to something older and harder to automate: the compulsion to make.
The Raven, title sequence
Captive, main titles
A great neutral drug
“It’s a great addiction,” Senturk says of creating. “It’s a drive. A good drug.” He is only half joking. When I pressed him on how he sustains a career without a studio behind him, Senturk kept returning to the mechanics of flow, the psychological state where challenge and ability sit in perfect tension. “You have to be challenged, you cannot be bored, and you have to be enjoying it. Then all the energy you are putting into it becomes excitement.”
He points out that games are engineered around exactly this loop, easing off when you struggle and ratcheting up when you thrive, and that a working creative rides the same dynamic every day. Overchallenged, you burn out. Underchallenged, you go numb. The work lives in the narrow channel between.
The fuel for all of it is curiosity. “Curiosity is what sparks the creator,” he says, but his relationship with it is disciplined rather than romantic. “First I have to narrow it down to one single topic, and I invest my time in that single topic. Otherwise my attention just scatters.” He describes the result as effortless action: pick the one thing within your scope that you are genuinely good at, then bring all your intensity and heat to solving it.
Nokta, Senturk’s early personal short exploring power, control, and luck
Carving the digital marble
Ask Senturk whether he is a specialist or a generalist and he answers without hesitation: agnostic. Motion Design, games, film, TV. In his OFFF presentation he showed a pie chart dividing his work across all of them, and his point was that treating them as different disciplines misses what they share.
What binds them, in his telling, is material. “Creativity always feeds on limitations and restrictions,” he says. “Sometimes they do not look like it at first, but they can be a blessing.” Every project arrives with its own constraints: the brief, the deliverable, the audience, the medium. Rather than fighting them, he treats them as the block of stone. “Consider there is a marble in front of you, and you are carving it out of your computer. Digital art has material too.”
His process is built around making that material his own. For commercials and films he starts with a blueprint, gathering mood work and references, cutting them into a reference edit, and testing whether the flow and the feeling are right. Only then does he build the storyboard on top. “It becomes not someone else’s material. It is my material.” Then production starts, realism kicks in, and the project evolves. “It looks different than what you imagined, but it is the thing you have.”
I recognized the pattern immediately and invoked Steven Pressfield’s idea of the Divine Muse from The War of Art. Senturk agreed. There is a madness to the method, a deliberate practice of showing up so the muse has somewhere to land.
Pens, and the turning point
Every career has a hinge, and for Senturk it swung in 2014, when he directed Pens, an animated film for Amnesty International with TBWA Paris. It was the first time he used motion capture, paired with a pin-art technique that until then he had only ever seen used expressively, as pure visual texture. “In that project, I tried to use it to tell a story.”
Pens, for Amnesty International, the 2014 film Senturk calls his turning point
The film went on to win more than twenty awards, but Senturk is quick to wave that off. “I did not make it to win awards. I made it out of curiosity.” The message aligned with his personal values, he lived inside the project for four or five months, and it handed him a directing career. Everything since flows from that decision to treat a technique as a storytelling instrument rather than a trick.
Range as a way of life
What came after is a body of work that refuses to sit still. Haute horlogerie for MB&F, including the hypnotic HM11 Architect film. Automotive work for Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur. A tenth-anniversary music video for Illenium. Cinematic trailers for Riot Games.
MB&F, HM11 Architect
Porsche, Exclusive Manufaktur
Illenium, tenth anniversary music video
He works wherever the project takes him, traveling when a production needs him on site, hired sometimes as director, sometimes as designer, sometimes for animation. “I am addicted to creation itself,” he says. “So I value the mutual effort when I work with another team.”
A fragile industry
The conversation turned somber when it reached the studios themselves. PostPanic, the Amsterdam studio Senturk worked with for years, went out of business during the pandemic. Revenant, the team behind his VALORANT Oni skin reveal trailer for Riot, shut its doors within the last year. “Everybody is doing their own stuff now,” he says of the scattered Revenant crew. “That aspect, I do not like at all.”
VALORANT, Oni Skin Reveal Trailer, made with Revenant for Riot Games
He also spoke frankly about a frustration familiar to anyone directing high-end commercial work right now: finished films that cannot be released. His most recent directed film, which again uses motion and facial capture, exists publicly only as a teaser, its release schedule stalled by forces entirely outside the production. “When you are creating a project, you want to show it to the world,” he says. “When you cannot show it, it just takes something away from that effort.” He has watched the same thing happen across the industry for five or six years.
I named the shift plainly: projects used to find you, and now you have to find projects. Senturk laughed in recognition. “I hate that part.” But there was no self-pity in it. There is a resilience built into what this community does, and Senturk embodies it, still chasing new projects big or small, keeping what he calls creation itself alive.
Full circle at OFFF
There was a quiet symmetry to having this conversation at OFFF. Senturk directed and produced the OFFF Milano 2017 main titles himself, an art deco science fiction piece blending practical effects with CG, with typography by Craig Ward. Nearly a decade later he returned to the OFFF stage not as a title designer but as one of the festival’s headline speakers, a working answer to the question I opened our conversation with: what does it look like when the creative mind wins?
OFFF Milano 2017, main titles, directed and produced by Onur Senturk
For Senturk, it looks like curiosity, narrowed to a point. A marble block, waiting in the computer.
Interview and words: Tim Thompson, RevThink, recorded at OFFF Barcelona 2026
Featured artist: Onur Senturk, Director and Designer, London
Website: onursenturk.tv
Instagram: @onursenturktv
Series: OFFF Barcelona 2026 conversations, part one of four