Monster Of IPA
Storyboarding / Animation / Script Writing / Directing / Character Design / Web Design / Point Of Sale
Social Impression:163k+ / Website Visits: 2,516  / YouTube views: 128k+
Monsters Of IPA was an awareness campaign to promote Batsquatch IPA and Colossal Claude Imperial IPA. The goal of the campaign was to educate consumers on myths of  these two northwest cryptids. As the lead designer, on this project I was responsible for creating two separate 3 minute animations to tell the tale of these beasts. 
Sketches and Early Story Writing
Early on I decided my main goal was to create a fun and educational piece on the monsters. With this in mind my original concept was to do a series of short animations that would be formatted for Instagram and read more like an animated comic than a full theatrical animation. However projects adapt, and after a few weeks the company decided to pivot. The concept evolved from simple looping animations on Instagram to two three minute videos with multiple characters, a narrator, scene changes and a script. Below are the storyboards from the early Instagram based concept to the addition of the narrator's subplot and then the base storyboard for the Batsquatch video.
Early Animation Studies
In these early animation studies I was trying to plan out the main motions of each scene. The goal was to have something that could be pitched to the Creative Director and the CEO in order to paint a picture of what the project could be. Though the project changed drastically, these early frame by frame animations laid the groundwork for the larger animation.
Landscape and Environment Illustrations
Monsters of IPA required a lot of landscape and environmental illustrations. The story changes location a lot so creating a process for illustrating these environments was pivotal for making the three month deadline. I ended up developing two separate processes to complete the scenes. If most of the scene was very detail heavy and stagnant then I would start with a sketch move on to a color study and then do the final render. Once that was complete I could then go in and animate each individual piece of the composition.
The second process I developed was for scenes that are more open and require a-lot of animation within the landscape elements. In the example below I use the final Claude scene. The ocean was going to have to be very turbulent so I knew that the workload was going to be more animation heavy. For this reason I would sketch out the general composition of the scene with attention to the objects and beings within the frame. Once those were done I animated the water using shapes in after effects to save me some time on sketching. 
Character Design
Doing all the character design was one of my favorite parts of this project. I used a combination of programs to create the animation rigs for each character.  First I would start off with sketches and planning, then transfer the sketches to adobe illustrator. In illustrator I created the character in organized layers from the ears all the way down to the feet. Next were the character visemes which were needed to lip sync the audio to the characters. Each face needed a number of different visemes to match the personalities, my personal favorite being the Batsquatch. Once the visemes and character design was complete I could move them over to adobe Character animator and build the puppet rigs. Once the puppets were animated they were imported into premiere or after effects for additional video editing and compositing.
  
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