Knock Knock London - Burberry

We don’t claim to control the weather, but when renowned British luxury fashion house Burberry asked us to produce motion graphic content as part of their “It’s Always Burberry Weather” brand campaign, we delivered rain, shine… and snow.

The larger campaign, which featured stars such as Kate Winslet, Olivia Colman and Barry Keoghan, went down a storm as a romantic homage to British weather. This smaller campaign, although still in the spirit of the larger production, was targeted primarily towards social platforms, featuring a variety of influencers improving the weather whilst touting Burberry’s high-end paraphernalia.

Courtesy of returning client Knock Knock London, we were brought on board to work with Burberry’s in-house team, who supplied the designs and layouts, with our focus primarily on the motion elements. We created classic broadcast-style weather graphics such as high winds, snow and isobars, along with other graphical elements including the Burberry logo, redesigned in C4D for a vintage broadcast-style ident.

Each influencer had their own bespoke backdrop featuring an array of weather systems faithfully reproduced in Adobe After Effects using a variety of layered particle effects, classic motion graphics and masking techniques to construct the retro vibe. The maps themselves went through a number of iterations as we experimented with 3D simulations and topology before settling on a system of stitching satellite imagery together within Ae. This gave us a highly detailed texture map which was then wrapped around a sphere effect that could be panned, tilted and repositioned whilst maintaining a high level of fidelity should we zoom in further.

The finished scenes were then colourised and treated with noise, amongst other effects, to help bring the elements together within the desired vintage aesthetic, but not before being bookended by a few stock elements and the aforementioned 3D ident.

The final edits were then sent back to the team at Knock Knock London and Burberry, who used the keyed footage of the influencers to overlay each sequence with improvised weather forecasts before releasing them on social platforms.

The final delivery was surprisingly broader than standard social formatting might suggest. Despite the campaign primarily using 9:16 outputs, we produced a range of large canvases which resulted in longer rendering times. Although they were only used for YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram, they still performed well, garnering thousands of views as part of a highly successful wider campaign.