Beavertown Brewery Takes You on an Intergalactic Trip through a Nautical Space Nightmare for Halloween

To celebrate Halloween this year, Beavertown Brewery has gone all out and created a three-minute illustrated short movie, taking you on an intergalactic trip through its nautical space nightmare - hand illustrated frame by frame by creative director Nick Dwyer (12 per second, to be exact). The animation, produced by the Ridley Scott Creative Group's Black Dog Films, is a reimagining of the eerie poem ‘Rime of The Ancient Mariner’ - but with a Beavertown twist, set in the briny depths of deep space.

Inspired by the likes of Fantasia and old school Looney Tunes, the short film takes a weird and wonderful take on the beautiful classic drawings by Gusav Dore from the original poem. Although the tale has been 'Beavertown-ified', it's nothing like Beavertown created before, subbing their usual bright colour palette and fun tone for that of one that is dark and eerie.

Nick Dwyer, Creative Director of Beavertown Brewery, said: “Priority number one when we started this project was not simply illustrating the poem line by line, or simply describing the words with visuals. The fantastic illustrations of Gustav Dore, amongst others, have this expertly covered, and true to our usual MO we wanted to make things weird, wild and wonderful using our unique visual style, whilst maintaining the melancholy and drama of the poem. 

We set the story in a twilight nautical and outer-space setting, blending our space-suited-skeleton imagery with antique diving equipment. We interpreted  “the bird” or “Albatross” as something a lot more angelic than I think people usually expect. We wanted people to get a sensory overload when they watched it, so used trippy imagery and played with colour intensity to really alter the pacing.”

This is the first moving animation that has been produced by Beavertown, marking their premier into the animation space. This is also the first time that Beavertown has collaborated with another artist, working with Alice Bloomfield, an animator, illustrator and director at Black Dog Films. 

Alice Bloomfield, Director and Animator at Black Dog Films, said: “My animation is all frame by frame which means hand drawing 12 individual images for every second of animation. It can be a drawn out process but also a very therapeutic one which starts by drawing the first and last frames and then then everything in between.

I usually create each component of the scene separately and then compose it together on after effects. For this project there’s been lots of textures added into the mix as well for a bit of grit and  atmosphere…”

Beavertown Marketing Director, Tom Rainsford comments, "Halloween is woven into our Culture. It’s a going out-out night, in full costume ready to party and it’s a staying in night, watching the newest horror flick with a beer. To celebrate Halloween, we created Beavertown’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ - a nautical space nightmare. We took the classic poem and mashed it with our skeleton-infested animated world. Mix that with an incredible soundtrack and you get yourself a trippy, psychedelic space nightmare to get you into the mood for Halloween. Best enjoyed with our accompanying beer ‘Blood of the Mariner’ - a cold hearted blood red lager."

As a shipmate to the Halloween short film, Beavertown have put a gory twist on a crisp classic, creating a new BLOOD RED lager ‘Blood of The Mariner’. A Lager for the bloodthirsty – this limited edition brew is crisp, light and super fresh, brewed with the addition of hibiscus for a brilliant red colour and a cranberry like dryness make this the perfect pint for Halloween parties, horror movie marathons or... well the usual stuff Lager goes with. Available on the webshop here.

The full film is out on Monday 24th October and you can watch it here.