LOS ANGELES — Bi-coastal production company Stardust recently delivered a 10-spot campaign from Corona promoting their sweepstakes to send several lucky fans on a trip to a prime football destination. Stardust was recruited for the project via agency Pereira & O’Dell to develop a package of fast-paced, high-energy animated shorts in a contemporary hand-drawn comic style.
The campaign celebrates the start of the football season and features over 11 minutes of original animation that echo the films’ humor and the signature rapid-fire delivery of narrator Jon Gruden. Each of the 10 spots is just over one minute long, and extols the football cred of cities that include: Chicago, Dallas, Green Bay, Knoxville, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and New Orleans, all of which are destinations in Corona’s “Find Your Beach For the Game” sweepstakes. The spots debuted last week on Facebook, YouTube and via an online media buy.
"Working with Stardust was a creative collaboration,” said Kathy Zembera, Interactive Producer, Pereira & O’Dell. “We loved what they brought to the table visually and stylistically, playing up the humor in the voiceover and developing a clean, sophisticated animation style that is perfect for the target audience that we're reaching out to with this campaign."
A team of five illustrators and six animators led by Stardust Senior Designer and AD Bill Bak spent two months developing the style, look and characters for this project working off of scripts developed by the agency, and created the animation to match the voiceovers from Jon Gruden which had been recorded in advance.
Stardust's Managing Director Dexton Deboree said, “The series was an opportunity for the whole team at Stardust to experiment with tools of illustration, comedy and character design. Our team was champing at the bit to show off their varied skill sets and talents and this project allowed us to do just that."
There was no live-action shoot for this campaign; however, the team did reference photographs and footage from NFL games and of Jon Gruden to help guide the animation and characters. The loose illustrative style of the animation was achieved using a combination of hand drawn flash-based cell animation, finished in Adobe After Effects, together with Autodesk Maya for the character animation.