“Warped Tour itself is a contradiction — it’s a punk rock festival that’s also a prodigious marketing machine, sponsored from top to bottom by brands hoping to win over fans in between shows. This isn’t a knock on the tour, really: if it weren’t able to bridge that gap, it probably wouldn’t exist.” [How Warped Tour led the consumerist music festival revolution, Vox, July 23 2019]
Warped Tour began in 1995 and became the Vans Warped Tour one year later. It toured the world for the next twenty-five years. The tour blended punk, ska, rock, and emo with extreme sports and an array of corporate sponsors. It became the pinnacle of cool.
The Vans Warped Tour ended this year. Creative Studio, Better Half, has worked with the Vans team to create a mobile-first documentary series in twenty-five episodes that pays homage to the Tour. The episodes were released daily across all of Vans Warped Tour’s social channels.
To begin creating the docu-series, Better Half’s archival and design team sourced and sorted through 800+ hours of footage, as well as 10,000+ photographs taken from 1995 – 2018 and shot 44 hours of interview footage with musicians, legends and the extended Warped family, to bring the narrative history to life. The animation team created 50+ custom animations and illustrations, amping up the archival footage and incisive interviews with eye-popping collages and dramatic visuals. Animations were first illustrated in Photoshop then brought to life in After Effects, while some of the hand-drawn elements were also animated in Photoshop.
“Better Half took our creative vision for this project and delivered beyond what our team & partners envisioned. It was a pleasure partnering with them and to see the wonderful fan responses their work elicited,” stated Adam Nelson, branded content producer at Vans.
- The Vans Warped Tour Instagram account has reached 1.2 million followers.
- Engagement rate per video averaged at 18.5k views and roughly 55 comments (and is continuing to grow.)
- The episode with the highest engagement achieved 28.129k views, 7,469 likes and 269 comments.
Here are a few episodes:
Credits:
Production: Better Half
Animation, Illustration & Title Design: Better Half
Edit: Chris Amos @ Final Cut
Poster Design: Dewey Saunders
