The Brand
Torani creates flavors and mixes for coffees through its core mission, “Flavor for all, Opportunity for all.”. As part of a community outreach campaign, Torani helps feature coffee communities with great stories to tell. For this project, the community we helped highlight was Glitter Cat Barista. Glitter Cat is an LGBTQIAP+ Community focused on reimagining the coffee industry through competition and events.
The Plan
Right after our team celebrated the 2022 new year… At what seemed like 12:01 am, we received a message from the incredible team at Ready State. They had a really meaningful story that needed to be told and they wanted us to be involved. The story was the fascinating story of Veronica Grimm, the founder of Glitter Cat Barista.
Part of the reason we do what we do is to tell stories that can change how people feel about a certain subject. We want to inspire people and do our little part in making the world a better place. No more than 5 minutes into our planning conversations and it became abundantly clear that this was a story we NEEDED to help tell.
The Approach
When the team at Ready State came to us, they had 2 things
- A mood board with some ideas.
- Veronica’s voice-over file.
The mood board was filled with highly stylized hand-drawn illustrations with beautiful color palettes.
The style needed to match the story and fit within both Torani and the Glitter Cat brand. No easy task but we were absolutely up to that challenge. Here’s a look at some of our early style explorations.
The Work
Ultimately, we landed on a style that had more realistic human proportions and was very heavy with hand-drawn animation.
Once we understood the style we’d be working with for this video, it was time to create the animatic. This is essentially an edit with some movement to help us understand timing before starting animation.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the project was then illustrating ALL the frames needed for a 3-minute animation. About 30 scenes and 7 characters needed to be created in total, (That’s more than most kid’s books!).
As we got into animation, our biggest goal was to simply give life to the very detailed illustrations we created. These were mostly subtle movements, but a few scenes to create some interest were very important to tell the story.
Lastly, we added in music and sound design, being very careful not to take anything away from the voice-over and the visual story being told.
The Results
While some of our work is KPI driven, this project was created with the sole intent of driving awareness to Glitter Cat Barista. A great strategy for building trust with an audience. 😉
