Arctic E461 Animated Banners

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Arctic Animated Banners

Sparkling animated banner with a fresh & funky vibe for Swiss heavyweight Arctic.

Cool Customer

When approached by a company that boasts the ‘Spirit of innovation’ as their credo we were not only thrilled with the prospect of promoting their state-of-the-art earphones for the Pro Audio market, but also at working with a company that appreciated our cutting-edge animation which would wow their audience and do justice to such a cool product.
Arctic, formerly known as Arctic Cooling, is a Swiss manufacturer best known for computer cooling components. Back in 2010, the company set out on an expedition to expand their business into other areas of consumer electronics and developed a diverse range of products that spanned computer peripherals, audio products and home entertainment PCs.
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Arctic-E-461-Animated
Arctic-E-461-Animated

A Brief exposure

Having experienced the jaw dropping banners Hatch had already created for Adam Hall, GrooveGear, Faital Pro & Monacor, our friends at Arctic wanted us to raise the temperature of consumer awareness across Europe focusing on their E461 premium earphones. Having already booked the adjoined ‘L’ shaped banner position on Audio Pro’s site, Arctic commissioned Hatch to create a short animated sequence that highlighted their product’s rich dynamics, whilst offering a cool ‘must-have’ feel to a mobile device-using target market.

Scripting the snow story boarding

Before we embark on any expedition in animation we would meticulously plan our proposed route, this would usually take place in the form of a rough series of sketches which story-board out the frame sequence, direction of our cast members, props, graphical elements and text. This is done partly due to the time it takes to artwork, program and test the final anim, it’s a lot quicker to erase and scribble down again and efficient to have a script to work to. The image below is the actual story board created prior to firing up the macs.
Arctic Cesar Testimonial
Arctic
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Sub zero concept sets the stage

An underlying frozen concept derived initially from the company name & history linked to it, materialised in the form of the wintery theme of our banner. The existing ‘nobody but me’ product tagline was set as a constant element, stamped into the snowy tundra background like a footprint.

A blizzard of animation

Ground Frost – Starting from the ground up we wanted to bring the wintery backdrop to life, but how to animate static snow?… the answer was in tiny twinkling sparkles that randomly appear throughout the sequence. Subtle and so simple you may not notice the glistening gems on a conscious level unless pointed out, but here at Hatch we concentrate on the minutest of details in order to magnify the overall experience.

Logo Reveal – We wanted to incorporate an interesting way of presenting the parent company logo with the use of rich media. As the Arctic logo and tagline were to appear in the lower half of the vertical banner as a sign-off, we needed to seamlessly melt the logo reveal sequence into the existing snowy background. This was achieved by cleverly incorporating the horizontal wave found in the logo. The shape is the first element to enter the stage thus sectioning off the area for the movie. Working from an Adobe Aftereffects template we see a gloved hand enter stage right and brush away the fluffy, white top-snow to reveal the frozen surface. Below the ice, an unidentifiable object ripples into clarity to give the second sequence reveal, that being the Arctic logo and the ‘Spirit of innovation’ tagline. This movie sequence has been strategically stitched into the banner.

Arctic model
Down with the kids The foreground animation sees a demographic of ‘too-cool-for-school’ twenty somethings pre-supplied courtesy of the Arctic advertising team, which individually contain the product shape converted into everything from clothing trims to hair accessories, always a bonus to work with quality imagery. Ultimately, the unwritten message being that these are personal headphones of choice for the uber cool.

Copy writing melts in & out

Just as much focus went into the written message, with our in house copywriters giving a distinctly wintery vibe to the snappy copy which thaws in and out of our animation.

Arctic E461 - BM

Skating on thin ice

One of the hardest parts of this job is only realised once you understand that this unconventional ‘L’ shaped animated banner is actually two banners merged together. The technical challenge here was to have the artwork and animation run seamlessly across both the horizontal and skyskraper banners.
This is further complicated by the fact that when a web page loads it will load all of the elements in an order, which meant if our looping top banner loaded before its adjoining sister banner and started to automatically run, the animation would be out of sync. In order to zip things up this was overcome with a special piece of coding courtesey of Hatch’s egg-head programming team, who coolly built instructions into the first banner, not to autorun before the other banner had loaded.

Fresh outta the fridge

With much tweeking and testing, along with an equally impressive yet simplified animated banner gif version that would substitute for devices such as an ipad unable to view flash content, the banner ran live on the Audio Pro International website and received much deserved recognition, below the final animation in all of its glistening glory. Contact one of our alchemists to add some sparkle to your online presence.

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