Stardust recently completed a 10-spot campaign for Corona, animated in a contemporary, hand-drawn comic style. The campaign celebrates the start of the football season and features over eleven minutes of original animation that echo the films' humor and the signature rapid-fire delivery of narrator Jon Gruden.
Each of the ten 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.
A team of five illustrators and six animators led by Stardust Senior Designer and AD Bill Bak spent 2 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.
"The series was an opportunity for the whole team at Stardust to experiment with tools of illustration, comedy and character design," commented Stardust's Managing Director Dexton Deboree. "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. Working with Pereira & O'Dell and Corona was a true pleasure."
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.