During a discussion about legendary tennis games, Temper’s team mentioned the famously long 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer. But rather than trying to visualise almost five full hours of tennis, Hono became fixated on the idea of graphically translating the match point for the ciders packaging, on a grid of green and purple. “We went for the moment the win was decided: the final four seconds, broken into 60 frames. One frame, one bottle,” Sebastian shares.
Once the studio had drawn up its 60 frames of action, they could have printed 60 perfectly rendered labels. “But that felt wrong for Temper,” Sebastian says. Instead, they collaborated with Risograph print studio Herr & Frau Rio in Munich who printed one base label design for all the bottles. Hono then finished and numbered each of these by hand: “The ball isn’t printed; it’s punched out, so when light comes through the bottle, the cider becomes the ball,” Sebastian explains. This hand-cut element wasn’t the only thing that created movement in the packaging’s design: “Riso is interesting precisely because it refuses to reproduce anything perfectly. Colours shift, registration moves, no two impressions are the same. When we digitised all 60 labels and animated them, those tiny printing differences started moving too.”
As is always the case with stop motion, each label only makes sense as part of the sequence, “so we couldn’t really see the result until all 60 were finished, scanned and played back on a screen. If a frame was off, we would only have found out at the very end, and fixing it would have meant going back to print and handwork,” Sebastian ends. “That made the moment we first pressed play quite tense. It took Nadal four seconds to win that point. It took us considerably longer to draw it.”