Define a new vision for an established franchise

Details:

Role: Director, Brand Creative
Client: Bethesda & Zenimax Online Studios
Agency: Ayzenberg & The Mill

The Challenge:

For the Elder Scrolls Online’s Necrom chapter, Bethesda challenged us to honor the long legacy of ESO cinematics while evolving its creative vision. We seized the opportunity to introduce a new player class against a rich tapestry of cosmic horror themes, including spatial misdirection, visual metaphor, and psychedelic shifting environments. Our new direction was brought to life with best-in-class technology, performance and facial capture, and a haunting bespoke score. This resulted in a fan favorite cinematic that sparked mass awareness, excited lapsed players, and drove pre-orders amongst the core. Our CG trailer kicked off the entire campaign, which we then followed up with designs for three pieces of key art, as well as the game box art for both standard and collector’s edition boxes

Results:

→ Winner of three Clio awards for best teaser, best CG design, and best sound design
→ Winner of the gold award at the Ciclope Animation awards for best animation for video games
→ The new campaign was a massive success for attracting new audiences, adding 2 million new users to the player base
→ Reinvigorated our relationship with Bethesda, expanding our overall scope of work and leading to year-over-year renewals of key assets, such as the tentpole CG trailer
→ On-time and on-budget delivery of all creative