Smirnoff Shorties

Conceptualising, storyboarding and animating a promotional reel for Smirnoff’s new product.

2025

Objectives

Smirnoff are launching their new product ‘Shorties’ as a direct response to the popularity surge in single-serve, premixed cocktails. They wanted a typography-led reel for socials that would drive awareness of Shorties, and its key USPs.

Key Considerations

Embodying the iconic, confident and vibrant energy of Smirnoff was a key consideration in this brief, leading to my choice to use bold and disruptive colour combinations across each frame. Pace was also a big factor, as we wanted to hook audiences in before that two-second drop off point.

Design Execution

I began by storyboarding some static frames in Illustrator, thinking about what colours I wanted to use from Smirnoff’s extensive brand palette, and how I wanted the reel to flow from start to finish.

After some experimenting with different typographic layouts and potential transitions, I landed on a silhouette of the Shorties bottle as the centre of transitions across the reel. Through zooming and rotating it, it allowed me to move between type-focused frames and images of the product. I also experimented bringing some of the key USPs to life through their type animation – e.g. mimicking the motion of resealing a bottle for the same word, and having the ‘No Bubbles’ messaging repeated in outline as a way of reinforcing it in a fun way.