Beavertown taps Coleridge for its Halloween fable

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's legendary poem detailing a sailor's watery recounting, has long been admired for its author's ability to conjure up vivid visuals through language.

It's unlikely, however, that many have pictured as spectacular a sci-fi scenario as Beavertown manages with this enjoyably foreboding retelling through their unique illustrative identity.

Led by creative director/designer Nick Dwyer, with animation from Alice Bloomfield, the brewery's Halloween treat is filled with striking imagery and vivid interpretation, at once instantly recognisable to fans of the brand and perfectly intertwined with the text through excellent narration from Ross O'Donnellan.

Here, Dwyer explains the story behind the execution: 

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, although arguably quite obscure and challenging, contains some of the best-known and repeated lines in literature – even if most would have a tough time placing them. That, in itself, provides great opportunity for interpretation, and paired with the overt nautical theme that organically translates to an abstract, fever-dream version of our vintage sci-fi visuals I reckon you would be pard pressed to find a more appropriate poem to version or 'Beavertown-ify'.

"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. 

"Examples include setting the story in a twilight nautical/outer-space setting, blending our space-suited-skeleton imagery with antique diving equipment, changing the usual interpretation of “the bird” or “Albatross” to more angelic, trippy imagery and playing with intensity of colour in a way that alters the pacing and sensory overload of the animation and video.