Dark Arts Coffee x Motörhead

In this third collaboration with London’s hardcore cult coffee roasters; Dark Arts, KITCHEN have directed and animated a spot crammed full of energy launching the new Motörhead x Dark Arts merch line. A fusion of coffee and the band’s infamous thrash heavy metal sound gives rise to a high-paced epic spot celebrated in the style of 80’s animation. 🤘☕♠️

George Coffey KITCHEN’s Director says:

‘We’ve been having a great time creating animations for Dark Arts already and we were over the moon that they came back for a third time. Knowing that this time it was for a Motörhead collab was the icing on the cake!

Artistically, we knew they wanted something different from what we’d created previously; this time taking influence from one of our favourite eras of animation; 80’s cartoons. We needed to show a link between the coffee and the metal thrash of the band. For inspiration, we re-watched a bunch of intros and some of our old fave episodes, teenage mutant ninja turtles, thundercats, transformers, whilst mapping out a rough animatic.

An idea came together of someone in a boring work meeting and being completely over it, drinking their Darkarts x Motörhead coffee, which sparks a transformation into a kind of Metal-Devil-Beast Creature, who just tears the office apart and ends up on some classic stacks sitting atop coffee mountains with coffee lava and a chorus of their colleagues breaking through and joining in with rocking out.’

Everything about this project is, in fact, everything we love about what we do. Fun 2D animation, over the top 2D FX, some comic timing with the lead character – and just creating a whole world.’

The process from initial animatic sketch to roughed out animation, then the line-up and finally colour, shading and highlights.

The build-up of the end scene from initial sketches to the layers created in the 3d space, the smoke animation on top of that and the final composition.