Throughout Cupcake Vineyard’s Summer of Joy Sweepstakes, customers at major retailers, super markets, and corner stores across the world could buy a bottle of Cupcake Vineyards wine, scan the QR code under the cap, and partake in an exciting, eye-catching interactive throw-back through the decades.
This Joy Through the Decades campaign animation was one of the largest, most joyful projects Explainly has tackled yet! In association with Explainly's clients Cupcake Vineyards, The Wine Group, and our partner software development team Yeti.
I wrote, designed, and directed a team of artists to product more than 10 minutes of fun, nostalgic, elevated animation for their interactive mobile software experience built to promote their Summer lineup of wines.
While evoking joy and pushing the boundaries of how animation can be used to market and interact with brands, we were also sure to maintain Cupcake’s brand style, fonts, colors, and follow ADA best practices. Out of endless possibilities and over 200 animated pieces, you can check out a selection of our favorites in the video above
The ‘Joy Under Every Cap’ campaign yielded amazing success with great quantities of scans and engagement exploring the colorful interface, and creating, playing, and replaying our custom 30-second animated mash ups.
Our partners at Yeti ensured that every user had a joyful experience when interacting with the campaign’s UI environment, and that the software was designed to entice users to keep coming back each time they purchased a new bottle of Cupcake wine. All the while, the platform and animations were designed to remain on-brand, by creating a design system utilizing Cupcake’s existing colors and fonts, with minimal changes. We aimed to accentuate their playful brand colors, all the while ensuring that ADA best practices are followed. I also orchestrated a thorough legal review to ensure that all of our references were well within our client's IP rights.
To gather and utilize the customer information provided during the app’s onboarding process, Yeti set up a basic integration with Google Analytics that captured hundreds of standard data points and events. They additionally created an API that allowed all of the information captured within the app to be sent to Cupcake’s Mailchimp account, allowing them to save user information for any follow up marketing efforts they may want to undertake.
After writing hundreds of clip concepts and quickly locking the 220-scene script with our client, we began recording voice over with Joshua Alexander, and exploring a variety of beautiful design options to inspire the project’s joyful visual style, tone, and color palette. After choosing a final style with our client, we began sketching storyboards that were revised, illustrated, and perfected.
After all the exciting elements of pre-production and concept designing were complete, it was finally time to bring it all together in the animation stage! Fluid motion design, fun transitions, jammin’ music, lively voice over, and thoroughly immersive sound effects combined to create our final product to deliver to our client. I hope you love this thrilling project as much as I loved producing it.
Joy was good then, and so is today – choose joy!
Note: All preparation, materials, visuals, and sketches, including all electronic files used to create the project remain the property of Cupcake Vineyards, The Wine Group, Wolf Like, Yeti LLC, and Explainly.