ABOUT

Woven is a challenger whisky brand that started life producing small batch limited edition whiskies, until Superblend was born. Their first permanent addition to their lineup, Superblend is an eclectic whisky that features an unusual blend of whiskies, from the USA, Ireland, Germany, England and of course, Scotland. Superblend is blended without borders, and the Woven team approached us to collaborate on producing a launch with impact.

The core brief was to create a hero animation that felt distinctly Woven – a film that would challenge premium whisky connotations, and allude to the unique methods, flavours, and appearance of Woven’s brand and products. We wanted to champion their brand ethos of ‘Experience Whisky’ as well as the product tagline – ‘Blended across borders’. To add further cohesion and brand recognition to the piece, we decided to centre the animation around the shape of Woven's iconic, unusual apothecary-style bottle. This gave us a core shape to work within, but also gave us license to push other elements of the animation into a much more abstract space, knowing that the bottle shape would continuously link each shot back to the product with ease.

One of the most unique things about Superblend was the whisky tasting notes – a plethora of unusual sensations that steer clear of the more expected ‘fruity’ and ‘floral’. We used these notes as our springboard, taking ones like ‘going up in an elevator quickly’, ‘oily’, and ‘sandy’ to inform our initial animation tests.

From there we needed to determine what shape each exploration would take, keen to steer away from forms that made sense for each of the materials – we wanted to keep things unexpected, drawing parallels with the experience of drinking Superblend.

With the core elements of the piece defined, we were able to test multiple materials, colours and lighting treatments to reach the final cut. Our team then needed to figure out how we tie all of these abstract, heavyweight tasting note visualisations back to a final product reveal. Pulling on ‘Blended across borders’, we impactfully demonstrated all of the tasting note elements coming together, forming something that is at once chaotic but also intriguing and beautiful.

The piece was used as intended across social media and the Woven website, but it came into its own at Woven’s pop-up shop in St James’ Quarter in Edinburgh. It acted as an on-brand backdrop to draw people into the pop-up in December ’23, and has won multiple awards for its' creativity.

Project credits:

⁠Concept work and 3D animation: Where Giants Roam
3DS max, Houdini, VRay and Corona produced for OOH & in-home advertising

Custom sound by Sensory Works

Brand design Freytag Anderson