Gachabot by Afterlight
- Product
- Client:
- Popper Asia
- Date:
- 2025/11
- Completed in:
- 2 weeks
Two weeks to turn a festival IP into something people would never throw away.
Afterlight is a one-off social culture festival IP created and hosted by Popper Asia — a night-time world where music, art and technology collide. When they set out to build this universe in the real world, they needed more than lighting, stages and screens. They needed a character that could carry the spirit of the festival into people’s hands and homes.
That character was Gachabot — the mascot of Afterlight.
Gachabot lived inside the festival’s game loop and digital storytelling, but for it to really matter, it had to exist as a physical object. Our task was to help Popper Asia design and materialise Gachabot as a collector piece that felt intentional, weighty and worth keeping long after the last track faded out.
Design and fabrication ran in parallel to meet the event clock.
With only two weeks from brief to festival opening, there was no room for long approval chains or overseas production. While Popper Asia refined the creative and interactive journey of Afterlight, we were already engineering joints, testing print tolerances and locking in how each surface would feel in the hand. Local, in-house fabrication meant we could prototype, iterate and commit to final production in days, not months.
The mascot became a physical anchor for the Afterlight experience.
On site, Gachabot did more than sit on a shelf. As a tangible extension of the festival IP, it tied the interactive quests, visuals and atmosphere back to a single, recognisable character. Guests didn’t just remember lights and music — they remembered the little robot they could hold, display and photograph. The collector piece turned a two-night event into something that could live on desks, shelves and social feeds long after the festival ended.
Two weeks. One mascot. A keepsake that outlived the night.
By giving Afterlight’s mascot a physical body, we helped transform an abstract festival world into something people could touch and take home. The project showed that when IP, character design and fabrication move together, even a one-off event can leave behind objects that feel permanent, not disposable.