Topo Chico
Topo Chico Premiere
Art Direction | Storyboarding | Illustration | Animation
Sound design: Mitchell Hardage, Chris Cella
Topo Chico launched a new series called Topo Chico Premiere, which helps promote talented, on-the-rise musicians. In addition to that, they wanted to create artfully strange and compelling MTV-esque animate bumpers to tee up each video. We created two bumpers for this series. Our guideline was to keep it weird and use subtle but recognizable Topo Chico branding.
Storyboarding
Our first bumper draws inspiration from the southwest, with beautiful landscapes and strange cacti. We came up with a story of a lost cowboy that starts tripping in the desert, walks into a saloon and gets served up a refreshing Topo Chico. Think western Jack Torrance vibes (before things get scary)
DIY Wave Warp
As we started to explore how to animate this bumper, we thought about a few ways to really play around with the animation. Especially since the story leans into making it weird. We decided to try an analog technique for this wave warp scene to get the right distorted effect. With a simple top-down camera set up and glass filled with water, we were able to achieve a more unique warp than a digital effect.
Process
The second bumper we worked on was inspired by American traditional tattoos mixed with a cut-paper style art direction. The concept was about a person walking into a tattoo shop and picking out flash design that comes to life and spirals into the Topo Chico logo. We loved getting to come up with the different flash designs at the beginning and even snuck a little easter egg of a few of our own.
