A year on Lowe’s
In 2023, I was asked to lead Lowe’s Tentpole account while my manager was on maternity leave. This was a big shift from my day to day tasks as a motion designer.
I hit the ground running managing what would become a tight-knit team of 5–7 motion designers, collaborated closely with the Deutsch’s Design Team and worked along side the Deutsch Account Team managing Product Matrix grid with all the offers Lowe’s wanted to showcase during it’s Tentpole Campaign. I also developed relationships with external 3D vendors to create 3D assets of the featured products, ensuring we hit every detail and every delivery, and boy did we have a lot of deliveries for this campaign.
For each Tentpole event (the major holidays like: Memorial Day, Father’s Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Black Friday etc), each holiday had 8 - 12 videos minimum.
With in those 8 - 12 spots there was 5 sections where we had a different product offer we needed to showcase, each of those products we needed to create a 3D asset for. On average we had to create 20 - 50 3D elements for each campaign.
Since this was our heavies campaign we created some simple toolkits to help keep us quick to adjust offers/products and ornament shapes.
We created a drop down menu so we could switch through all the different ornament tags we had to pick from. For the ornaments dropping down and swinging, we used an expression so that we didn’t spend the next 5 months adjusting animation curves and we could focus on animation and implementing the products in place to match the revolving door of changing product offers.
We also had create resizes for each campaign, so these simple toolkits we created helped us here too.
At the start of the Holiday Campaign, we started with 54 spots to create, but we ended up making over 72 spots by the end of it all. These additional spots were added as testament to how quickly we were able to make adjustments to the spots and add in additional offers.
Lowe’s Tentpole Holiday
When we came to the holiday season we shifted the design to have a more cheerful holiday look and feel. We developed a new intro where the Lowe’s gable would drop in like an ornament and push towards the camera to reveal the holiday offers.
Black Friday Golden Gable Deals
For Golden Gable, we updated the Lowe’s Gable with a golden border. We utilized the gold border around the ornament tag with some shiny highlights as we travel through the spots.
Black Friday Deals
For Black Friday Deals we has to incorporate a variety of different ornament shapes and size. Here is where we made use of our drop down menu giving us the flexibility to switch ornaments at the drop of a hat.
25 Days of Deals
On 25 Days of Deals, we had a fun mix of power tools, artificial Christmas trees and lights. We also were able to bring in a nice snowy background to add some visual interest in these spots.
Custom Endcards for each Campaign
Each Campaign got an endeared that’s colors matched what was in each spot we made. A nice touch to end these spots on.
3D direction change
While we were working on the Holiday Campaign I wanted to see if when we came back for Q1 2024 we could make the 3D assets make more of an impact on the spots. Since we were spending all this time creating the 3D assets, most from scratch, I want to try and utilize them more in our work.
I discussed with the Design Team about creating some simple options to take advantage of the 3D assets. We developed a simple solve, to have the 3D assets rotate into place, and to transition we lost the floor element which opened up the door to have us rotate from asset to asset.
We also had some other design changes we had to solve for. For the last 2 offers in the spots they wanted to use a smaller gable, and a different offer lock up.
Animation Direction Change/Last batch
On this last campaign, we introduced a new design direction and reworked the 3D animations to include rotational movement for each element we built. These changes completely transformed the look and feel of Lowe’s Tentpole by the end of the project. These additions has us end Lowes Tentpole in a totally different look than when we started. No more static 3D elements, no platforms, no more swiping from lock up to lock up.
Fun Facts:
Two different people had babies during this project
3 different producers
Handful of late nights
You also start seeing this stuff all over the place.
My twin’s swim instructor had on of the ceiling fans we did.
The leaf blowers I think everyone in my neighbor hood had one type of another of the leaf blowers we made.