Client: Beavertown Brewery
Type: Product launch. 2D Animation.
Invasion of the Lupuloids
Beavertown is a brand known for marching to the beat of its own drum. Their founder, Logan Plant, has two passions: beer and music. After an explosion in the brewery’s popularity they decided to brew the first permanent addition to their collection of core beers : Lupuloid IPA.
Beavertown are just as famous for their unique illustrative packaging as they are for their beer and the “Lupuloid” character for their new can artwork (left) was one of their boldest yet.
A bold new core beer. A bold new piece of brand artwork. Why not take another bold new step to promote the launch?
That meant taking the brand into animation. Shot-by-shot we planned a mini music video telling the story a planetary invasion: think Mars Attacks meets Salad Fingers. Set to a track written and performed by Beavertown’s founder, Logan Plant, the film tells the story of a Lupuloid takeover.
The ‘old’ Beavertown world (found on the cans of its original core range) is infiltrated by the “Lupuloids”, alien hop-creatures from outer space. There’s an ambush, there’s a battle, and there’s a victory. The Lupuloids are here to stay.
Launch & lead up
The launch itself was going to be a loud one with branded events and appearances promoting the new brew, plus a big social media announcement. For several weeks before launching the marketing/pr teams wanted to create some mystery around the release. A hype around the idea that ‘something’ was coming.
The film was deployed in two ways. Before the big launch, short edited snippets of the animation were released on social media ending with tag lines like “they’re coming” and “one week”.
It worked. Fans began discussing and speculating in the comments and as some of the die-hard fans started guessing correctly, excitement grew.
The full film was released on the day of the launch on social, on a dedicated web page on the Beavertown site, and it was played at launch events. The film was a celebration of the brand and an important thread which helped tie different elements of the launch together.
Thanks to the modular nature of animating with graphic assets we were able to overdeliver, too. We delivered assets for email signatures and general sharing as an unexpected extra.
Behind the scenes
A unique challenge we faced was designing a workflow which allowed us to handle all aspects of production and animation while sourcing artwork for sets, characters and scenery from the only man who can create Beavertown’s look and feel : Nick Dwyer. At the time Nick was very much a traditional, highly skilled pen and paper illustrator without the experience we’d usually focus on when sourcing illustration for animation. With a timeline in place which allowed very little time for learning on the job, we had to quickly adapt a workflow to get assets which we could place directly into animation without Nick having to learn the fundamentals of animation and layering. We quickly started drawing our own scenes and ‘parts’ with brief explanations of what would happen in the scene which we could pass onto Nick to illustrate over with the real deal, passing them back with the same layers and separation as we’d delivered. Thanks to Nick’s incredibly quick hand when it comes to creating iterations of his illustrative world it worked great. It turned out to be one of our most rewarding projects.
