Anheuser-Busch | Count Up

LegacyWork

Jun 28

Written By Greg White

Anheuser-Busch

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Count Up

July 2021

Get vaccinated, get a free beer.

The Perfect Pour

This was was not a standard VFX commercial brief, but the asks that come from Mike Woods and the team at m ss ng p eces rarely are. We like it that way.

We were challenged with designing a system that generates visual representations of vaccination rates using a beer as a metric. The content would be displayed across a variety of platforms, including social and live billboards. The group of people being sampled and the percentage vaccinated had to change based on the location and latest available data, which meant the liquid level and text needed be updated dynamically.

And naturally, the product also had to look like a nice tasty pint ready to drink.

The glass and beer were generated completely in CG, allowing us to carefully control the level of the liquid inside. We studied studio photography reference, matching the lighting direction and refractive properties of liquids inside a glass to really push the look of the beer. This also meant doing a deep dive into the behavior of bubbles and foam, a great challenge for our FX artists as both systems had to look authentic, loop seamlessly across the varying deliverables, and be able to transition from any beer level to the full hero pint glass.

In the end, we delivered a consolidated digital toolkit that was easy to update with the desired percentages and that could output multiple versions for the various resolutions