I had some fun this past week working on a little project for Drake’s Brewing. Brewmaster John Gillooly wrote a blogpost about cream ales and the his latest creation, Bump City Industrial Lager. We needed a quick graphic to promote the draft only release.

Bump City is a nickname for the city of Oakland, coined in 1972 by Tower of Power. It was the name of the second album recorded by the Oakland based soul/funk group. Naturally we needed to inject some music into the marketing.

In these types of situations, with little time to plan or source props, I’ll try to work with what’s around me. We had a set of speakers sitting around the Barrel House, so I popped off one of the grills and setup a little studio shoot. The plan was a to simply take a photograph of the beer in front of the speaker.

When I started looking at the images in post production, the project became more interesting. I wanted to take the concept one step further. Music needed to be a part of the image. So I devised a plan to make it bump with some movement, without actually having any video.

The best way to do this was to employ stop motion animation. After editing the original shot of the speaker in Adobe Photoshop, I created six additional copies. Then I adjusted the size and transparency of each copy and laid them precisely on top of each other. This made the image appear blurry and implied movement, but that wasn’t enough.

In order to produce a 15 second video I needed to export all the images into Adobe Premiere. I placed each of them on their own layer and started making them appear and disappear in short segments, from small to large. Figuring out the timing was tricky, but didn’t take long. Then I just repeated the sequence for 15 seconds and made the glass appear blurry with additional layers.

I’m pretty happy with the result given the short amount of time to execute the project. The video didn’t receive the level of engagement I was hoping for, but it was a nice deviation for our content feed. It’s always a challenge to keep things fresh and interesting. If you see Bump City Industrial Lager on tap give this delicious beer a try.