Tyler, The Creator
‘I Am The Grinch’
LYRIC MUSIC VIDEO
Illumination Entertainment commissioned us to direct and produce a lyric music video for Tyler, The Creator’s track ‘I Am The Grinch’ for the film. Pretty immediately, the idea of making Grinch fur covered lyrics jumped out as an awesome way to go, but we felt like there was even more imagination, mischief and hilarity we could add to compliment the spirit of The Grinch in an awesome way.
TARGETING AN EVEN WIDER AUDIENCE
A Strategic Solve.
To take advantage of the film’s PR value to viewers, we thought it would be cool to make the music video a continuous series of short GIF-like funny Grinch-y holiday moments that could become a social media campaign to generate farther reaching interest.
The Creative Concept
At first we started with green fur covered lettering over Christmas themed backgrounds because it felt pretty obvious and easy for viewers to relate. But what we found was that it was both too expected, and lost the spirit of Tyler. It was very important to us for the fans that we pivot and capture Tyler's personality to connect with fans on a real level.
To do that, conceptually, we referenced an advent calendar loosely but animated to make for some funny visuals in between the grinch green fur covered lyrics.
Additionally, we developed this back story that Santa had knocked the grinch out with a snowball, giving him amnesia. He was then time warped to LA into Tyler's body and was trying to find his way back to LA.
CHARACTER ANIMATION
The Animated Green Furry Dude
From early on, both us and the team at Illumination fell in love with the green furry dancer. For no understandable reason, him dancing and walking in silly ways made us all laugh and felt like a must to keep in.
Using mocap data in combo with the hair tool in cinema4d, we rendered him with redshift in a more solid colored world to match the language of the other illustrations more naturally.
THE CO-BRAND TIE IN
Limited Edition Grinch Le Fleur Converse
In conjunction with the film, Tyler, the Creator created a limited edition Converse shoe called Grinch Le Fleur using the signature green grinch fur for inspiration. Only 100 pairs were made making them hard to get.
USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN A NEW WAY
The Social Scavenger Hunt
To encourage brand and film engagement, the team at Illumination Entertainment who commissioned us conceptualized a scavenger hunt to encourage the most clever and persistent fans out there to win a pair of the Grinch Le Fleurs.
Using a QR code and word search tools, the idea is to find the codes hidden within the social media posts and within the video itself that help you win. An instagram account was created for the posts and we helped create simple animations in Instagram Stories as a tutorial to show viewers how at what to look for to win.
The Final Result.
We received great feedback from both Universal Music, Illumination Entertainment and Tyler, the Creator himself who were all delighted with how far-reaching a single video could go.
Here are additional stills from our design phase.
