Haze for Days

Overview:

Spec work project for the Crooked Crab, a favorite local brewery of mine. I’ve been a long-time fan of their iconic label designs in particular, and thought it would be a fun exercise to put one of them to motion. I reached out to Chris Bishop, the designer, for proper permission to adapt his work. Not only was he cool with it, but he even clued me in on the fonts used in the design, which was a massive help when preparing the image for animation.

Concept:

With Chris’ blessing, I decided to animate the design on Haze for Daze. Being one of their flagship brews, it’s much more evergreen than their seasonal or small-batch offerings. I knew I wanted to build the scene out like a brief vignette, culminating in a seamless transition into the can itself. A text callout of the Crooked Crab name would make it so the segment could function as a sort of advertisement, hopefully also drumming up some positive attention for the brewery in the process. For the label portion, I broke the artwork into layers using Adobe Illustrator, then animated in After Effects. For the can, I built everything in CGI using Blender.

Production:

To make the label design workable for animation, I first cleaned it up in photoshop, removing the unneeded text and logos. Then I converted it to a vector file in Illustrator, broke it out into layers to make it manipulatable, and filled in details hidden by overlapping elements. Once all this is done, the file can be imported to After Effects to begin animation!

To transition from the two-dimensional label design into the final shot of the can, the image was stretched onto a plane that starts flat, and then wraps around the virtual model of the can.

Credits:

To see more of Chris Bishop's work or to inquire about painting or design commissions, visit his website!

To learn more about the Crooked Crab's events and offerings, check out their site here!