Seeing as how its that time of year I thought I’d post some of the pixel art print design I did for last years bell holiday campaign.
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Holiday Pixel Art: boombox & breakin’ mp3 elves
Welcome pixelfreaks!
There is a story posted on pixeljoint.com about the bell pixel campaign I directed. I’ve got more pixel stuff from that campaign that I’m planning on posting here, including print designs and more full credits to the people that worked on these ads. I’m just in the process of getting this site set up and organized right now, but have a look around and feel free to leave comments. Check back later for more pixely goodness and thanks for visiting!
bell expressVU ad: HD people
This was the last commercial we produced for the bell pixel campaign - I like the self-referential script on this one. This ad was actually produced in HD format, and it was quite a treat to see those giant blocky pixels in crispy clear HD. You might not think that HD would improve the look of low res pixel animation, but seeing the designs sharp is much more like viewing them on a computer monitor - its super pixelicious!
Bell Canada has moved on to advertising with the beavers frank and gordon. Farewell pixel campaign, it was fun!
click below to watch the HD people ad here:
bell mobility ad: air band
Finally an ad that blends hair metal rock bands and looney tunes style impact with the ground! This ad also features the samsung a920 jive phone and encourages you to download music directly to your cell phone. I love the classic rock band stylings in this spot, and the dazed single focused obsession with being ready to rock. Nice impact with the amp and drums too!
view the air band commercial here:
bell mobility ad: greeks
This olympic theme spot for bell mobility goes way way back to when men wore togas and the pegasus ran free. Featuring the samsung a920 (aka ‘the jive’ phone) this ad also introduces us to the predecessor of our modern luge competition: sliding down an icy hill on an old shield. I think we were simultaneously working on about 9 different pixel ads for bell at this time, and this commercial was a finalist in the 2006 best single spot category, winning Bessie craft awards for writing, art direction and animation.
view the bell greeks olympic ad here:
bell mobility ad: cheetah
This bell mobility ad features the return of JT & Carl, who originally showed up in the tv@work commercial. This version of cheeta is the directors cut, which includes a rivulet of flourescent green toxic waste in the lab. For some reason bell didn’t want to be associated with toxic waste.
This advertisement compares the speed of Bell Mobility and Rogers cellular network speed, which made Rogers so unhappy they sued BCE claiming “The Cheetah & Hare ad disparages denigrates, discredits, tarnishes, diminishes and otherwise depreciates the value of the goodwill associated with the Rogers trademarks and Rogers brand. Rogers is symbolically devoured, choked on and then spat out by Bell,”. The full story is on cbc.ca
View the bell mobility cheetah commercial here:
sympatico ads: turkey and walnuts
These two 15 second spots were for a sympatico holiday promotion, these were the first bell commercials that we worked with cossette as the agency, and the first bell ads in the pixel campaign that were not for the mobility brand.
There are some nice little touches in these ads - I like the gelatinous turkey action as its being stuffed and the spray of walnut shells accompanied by little electrical crackles when it gets crushed in the laptop.
view these two commercials here:
bell mobility ad: the remaindeers
What says Christmas more than four drunken malcontent raindeer sitting in a cafe bitching about ‘the system’? If you can find a more festive holiday-oriented theme than that my hats off to you. We went through several design revisions for our raindeer - we developed a sort of standard design guide for human charactors, but animal characters added another layer of interesting design challenges. They had to look a bit grumpy and burnt out, but not too drunk.
This was one of those scripts that come in that are just right. There were very few changes from the original script for this one, though we did spend a bit of time making the glow on rudolphs red nose just right.
view the bell raindeer spot here:
bell mobility ad: ghost of christmas past
We did a few holiday tv commercials for the bell pixel campaign, this one features the ghost of christmas past looking a bit like Don Johnson in Miami Vice sporting an old style brick-phone.
Ah.. brickphones.
Those old brick phones were indestructible, but alas they dont include all the things we want in a phone these days: mp3 players, television, email, vibrating massage, etc.
view the bell ghost of christmas past ad here:
bell mobility ad: tv at work
This commercial for bell mobility and their ‘tv on your cellphone’ service shows some of the danger of using your cel phone as a television set while at the office. This advertisement was actually originally a pitch. In the fall of 2005 Bell canada’s advertising campaign used mostly stock images and lacked strong branding consistency. Bell started losing some of the brand name recognition they had built up during the first pixel ad campaign, particularly in the west.
This spot kicked off the return of pixel art advertising for Bell, but this time they decided to use this style for all of their branding: Mobility, ExpressVU & Sympatico.
This made us very busy over the fall and winter, with campaigns for TV, newspaper and magazine ads that all had to be designed in this pixel style. We worked with two agencies on this campaign: Rethink in Vancouver and Cossette in Toronto.
to watch the ad click below: