Canning Soon: A Home-Brewed Animated Film

Perivale Brewery is an award-winning modern microbrewery based on Horsenden Farm and co-owned by Waste leaders Mike and Christian. They wanted to announce that their beer will be sold in cans rather than bottles, and we knew that the announcement had to incorporate the two elements that make Perivale Brewery what it is: flavour and community. And of course, in true Waste style, it also had to be visually compelling.

The spark of inspiration for this film came from a scene in Pixar’s ‘Ratatouille’ - the one where Remy the rat is tasting his ingredients. As he eats, the animators visualised what he was tasting in simple graphics that popped up next to him. Our animation studio, This Thing of Ours, thought it'd be fun to try something similar with Perivale’s own community.

Customers were invited to scan a QR code on the beer bottles and upload a description of what they were picturing as they enjoyed a Perivale beer. Contributions included:

• “Diving into a paddling pool full of oranges” 🍊

• “Chocolate ice cream with huge muscles” 💪

• “Spiky crystal blackberries” 🌵
  

This Thing of Ours then turned the audience's comments into frame-by-frame animations, each one describing the beer’s flavour visually. They then had each of the frames printed as individual labels and labelled up around 400 bottles, shooting each one, one at a time, to create the stop-motion animation, called “Perivale - Canning Soon”.

Alex Robinson, Animation Director at This Thing of Ours, said of the process: “Coming up with the designs was the fun bit, as we had some pretty out there tasting notes from the community, which were already incredibly visual. Working with This Thing of Ours’ talented Jacob Reidy, we designed a unique visual for each flavour and in the usual TTOO fashion we made life 10 times more difficult for ourselves with the process, and took it out of the computer. We created a looping animation for each flavour, using traditional frame-by-frame animation, in a liquid motion style."

Christian Perrins, Head of Strategy at Waste Creative and Co-Owner of Perivale Brewery, said: “Craft beer fans are living in the golden age of creativity, with so many striking and delicious products to choose from - so getting their attention is challenging.

“Novelty for novelty’s sake undermines the credibility of breweries, so our strategy has always been to focus on flavour and ingredients - they may be weird but they’re always wonderful.

“We also lean heavily on community - which is why we named the brewery after the area we’re in. Perivale is being built with the people of Ealing, and their sense of belonging has been key to our growth. That’s also why we included them in the tasting notes that resulted in this animation.”

The film includes original music written by brewery co-owner and Waste’s Head of Strategy Christian Perrins, along with Mike Siddell, Perivale’s head brewer and violinist for artists like Mumford & Sons and Dev Hynes. Perrins and Siddell are also members of two-time Ivor Novello nominated, iTunes and Rough Trade Album of The Year-winning band The Leisure Society.

The track represents five different personalities which all combine at the end, and includes ‘found sounds’ recorded at the brewery itself. This was then all brought together with a final mix and sound design by Howard Whiddet.