In collaboration with the Supercell creative team we developed a story that was designed to celebrate the holiday season for the Brawl Stars player community while introducing the holiday skins of the Brawlers in the game.

The story takes place in the window display of the Starr Park Gift Shop where animatronic versions of Brawlers can’t keep playing a peaceful holiday song without wreaking havoc, but perfectly synched with the music. The short got to Youtube Trending #5 the day of its launch and racked up 13 Million views and counting. Ho, ho, ho…

Brawl Stars is a vibrant community full of myth building, beloved characters, and, of course, wicked fun gameplay. The idea was to corral all of it — the action, the irreverence, the weirdness, and the chaos into one, tightly-wrapped, heart-warming holiday gift for the fans.

From the initial brief, we had a few potential scripts we were working on, but we had some areas we knew we wanted to focus on — merging the kind of saccharine sweet holiday tones with Brawl Stars non-consequential violence.

In order to develop the look of the characters and sets, we absorbed a ton of reference: everything from Rankin Bass holiday classics to model train sets to Disney imagineering and more. The goal with the CG animation was to make it feel believable. We wanted all of the motions and movements of our CG characters to be physically achievable with pretty advanced animatronics.

So pulling from high-end vinyl figures for character design, we worked out how these figures would be built in real life — their scale, their movement, their placement within a set.

It was important that this miniature world was realistic and authentic. Our designers took care to look at materials and mechanisms which were true to scale and capability.

Because the music was so integral to the piece, we had a constant back and forth between our animation team, our editors, and our music partners. It seems simple, but this back and forth can create a huge bottleneck. By aligning on an approach in the beginning, we could make it work between our in house editor, our animators, and our sound partner.