SAPPORO Seibei Nakagawa
“What does it take to become a legend?”
One of my all-time favorites! I was creative lead + art director on this amazing project. It was an exciting challenge: take a handful of historical assets & combine them with a dash of stunning painterly goodness to produce a 60-second animated spot illustrating the globe-trotting 19th century journey of Sapporo’s founding brewmaster, Seibei Nakagawa.
Process
This piece needed an epic tone that would play more like a legendary tale, not a history lesson. We pulled this off utilizing a combination of 2d & 3d techniques honed while working on music videos. A killer original score and sound design by Mark Bartels took it to the next level.
Our behind-the-scenes breakdown reveals the layers of visual and sonic detail that brought Seibei’s journey to life.
Projection Mapping
We projection mapped 2d brand elements like the Sapporo can, pint, & bottle to create 3d assets that could live in our cg world. With this technique, we were able to animate a still photo of beer in 2d, then project it into 3d—no fluid sim necessary!
Adding Age to Digital Assets
Additional 3d elements were produced from scratch—shaded and lit realistically—then treated in post with heavy color correction and a healthy serving of blur and grain to break the pristine digital renders, leaving them feeling like dimensional black-and-white photographs. This compositing workflow helped Moose’s historical assets and our original cg elements to live happily side-by-side.
