Chase the Jaeger: Pacific Rim Illustration project

Everyone loves a reactive nod, from season to event, but the launch of a new film is my personal favourite which gave me the idea for this project.

The project

Today is the launch of the next in the franchise of the Pacific Rim films, 'Pacific Rim: Uprising.' From Transformer like fighting machines to mythical, fantastical creatures, the franchise offers eye catching and eventful battles that captivate its audience. But one thing that from the original movies that really stuck with me was how a group of people in the film chose the monsters side over their own Jaegers. Always one to challenge the norm, this posed a question and spark of a project, 'which side are you on?'

I started out with the intention of creating a couple of illustrations, but this developed quite quickly into a beast of a project that saw me look at product and label design to viral campaigns and limited edition cocktails.

Jagermeister: Jaeger product design

For the Jaegers I chose the favourite beverage, Jagermeister as my canvas, creating an illustration that endorsed both the mechanics and strength, as well as incorporating some of the key aesthetics that make the beverage unique such as its logo, integrating it into the chest of the machine. I tried many variants with the design, from full colour to dual foil blocking but to give the illustration real stand out, a black matt finish was chosen with a copper embossed foil block to make the limited edition label have real shelf stand out and promote the metallic workings of the machines themselves.

Chosen Creative

Chase: Kaiju product design

For the Kaijus, the brand had to be something distinctive and challenging. It also needed to add a sense of cleverness if it was to be partnered with another brand, so I chose a beverage that had a strong identity, maybe more of a premium one, but I'm all about changing up a brand's look and feel, so chose Chase potato vodka.

To give it real stand out as well as looking at Chase's recent additions, such as Rhubarb or Marmalade vodka, I chose to create a new flavour, Blueberry which not only sits well with their other flavours, but gave me a great platform to bring out one of Kaiju's distinct aesthetics, it's eye catching, neon blue blood.

This also took me down a slightly different route of embossing straight on to the bottle, opposed to creating a label. So I chose to take just the face of my illustration, emboss in black and allow the blueberry colour to add the detail of the Kaiju. This then fed into my box designs that used the metallic neon colour as an embossing on to a subdued spot gloss Kaiju illustration in the background.

Chosen creative

The campaign synergy

After creating both bottle designs, I realised both brands needed a launch platform to give them real stand out amongst their competition. So using the question that dictated my original idea, I created a two way campaign that would create synergy between the two to give them further stand out collectively. Therefore a cocktail was created, using both brand names to create a play on words, will you 'Chase the Kaiju' or 'Chase the Jaeger?'

Dependent on which side you choose depends on the drink you make. For the Jaeger followers you choose the "Chase the Jaeger" cocktail which sees the drink use:

4oz Jaeger: Jagermeister
2oz Chase Kaiju Blueberry Vodka
4oz Blueberry Red Bull

If you ally yourself with the Kaiju, you go for the "Chase the Kaiju" cocktail which sees the drink use Chase Kaiju vodka as the dominant ingredient.

4oz Chase Kaiju Blueberry Vodka
2oz Jaeger: Jagermeister
4oz Blueberry Red Bull

To advertise these a few posters were created to endorse the brands and the cocktail collectively. A somewhat lengthy project but a definite labour of love with many legs to take further into future projects.

Initial poster ideas

Chosen creative

Video Play

In addition a bit of After Effects play was needed here and having recently become a bit obsessed with the programme, had to give it a go. Crude concept video to advertise one of the cocktails.