Marwell Zoo

Hero illustration · Animation · Social campaign assets

Project Overview

Marwell Zoo commissioned Beyond to create the hero illustrations, which were then turned into animations and used on their site and social platforms, as well as offline media. This was for their annual Winter Wonderland and Glow seasonal campaigns, two of the most commercially critical periods in the zoo's calendar.

Creative

Branding
Design
Illustration
Storytelling

Development

Bespoke web builds
Ecommerce
Creative development

Motion & Photo

Animation
Motion Graphics
Photography
Video

Performance

SEO
PPC advertising
Copywriting

The Challenge

Marwell Zoo needed a creative partner to develop distinctive, deployment-ready campaign imagery that could anchor their full seasonal campaigns across every channel, from digital assets, printed materials, to social media, while giving their in-house team the independence to run the campaign entirely on their own.

The Challenge

Impact
The final output gave the Marwell team everything they needed to run a full social campaign independently: animated hero content, static adaptations across all major formats, and a visual identity that worked seamlessly from offline media down to an Instagram story

Solution
Beyond developed a small deck of bespoke hero illustrations capturing the warmth, magic and character of each event. Every illustration was then brought to life through bespoke animation, giving Marwell a complete library of motion assets alongside static originals, adapted across all major formats with a consistent visual identity throughout.

The Brand Film

Full Production - Storyboard to Screen

The brand film began, as all good films do, with a question: what is Chêne Bleu, really?

Not what it makes, or where it is, but what it feels like to be there - to stand in the vineyard at dawn, to trace the label's illustrations with your finger, to understand that the wine in your glass is the product of centuries of a single place doing what it does best.

We took that feeling and built a film around it.

The production process was comprehensive: from initial concept and storyboarding through to character design, CGI/3D animation, and final edit.

Every element was produced in-house, giving us the creative control to ensure that the film felt genuinely of the Chêne Bleu world rather than a generic luxury wine production.

The Interactive Label Experience

Bringing the Label to Life

The creative centrepiece of the film is the translation of Chêne Bleu's flat, hand-illustrated label world into a three-dimensional animated scene. The oak, the wildlife, the Provençal landscape - elements that exist as ink on paper - are reimagined as living, breathing, moving things. Leaves turn in a breeze. A rabbit crosses the foreground. The great blue oak rises into a Provençal sky.

To anchor this world physically, we built a custom 3D model of the Chêne Bleu bottle - modelled, lit, and animated with the same precision applied to the estate's own illustration work. The bottle moves through the film as both object and symbol: a vessel for the world contained within the label.

The result is a film that functions as both brand statement and act of imagination - a work that rewards the viewer who knows the label and enchants the viewer who doesn't. It can live on the website, at trade events, in press packs, and on social media without losing its power in any context.

An Invitation to Look More Closely

Chêne Bleu's label has always rewarded attention. Spend time with it and you find things you didn't notice before: a bird in the oak's canopy, a figure half-hidden in the vines, details that speak to the estate's history and ecology. The label is, in a sense, already a game - it just needed the right medium to make that play explicit.

We built an interactive web experience centred on the label illustration, inviting visitors to explore it as you might explore the estate itself: with curiosity, patience, and the occasional reward for looking in unexpected places. Hovering over characters and landmarks within the illustration reveals information - the story behind that element of the Chêne Bleu world, told in the brand's distinctive voice.

The illustration style itself was already fully formed - one of the strongest in the wine world - and we built directly on that foundation, extending it into new interactive contexts while remaining entirely faithful to its visual language and character. The result feels less like a digital product and more like the label having learned to speak.

The Group Landing Page

The landing page commission addressed the group-level challenge: for the first time, creating a single digital destination that could introduce Chêne Bleu's three wineries - the flagship, Chêne Bleu itself; La Verrière, the estate and accommodation offer; and Extreme Wine, the wine education programme - as a coherent, navigable whole.

The design is built around the brand's existing illustration world, adapted and extended to serve a new purpose. Where the label's illustrations are dense and intricate, the landing page has room to breathe: the great oak, the rolling vineyard, the estate buildings, the wildlife - all present, but given space to operate as an environment rather than a composition. Visitors are placed within the world before they are asked to navigate it.

Each of the three business arms has a dedicated presence on the page, with its own card, copy, and call to action. But they are not presented as separate links in a contents list - they emerge from the illustration world as natural destinations within it. The dotted paths that wind between buildings and landmarks on the page are drawn directly from the visual language of the brand's own maps and labels: you are not choosing a category, you are deciding where in this world to go next.

A word on craft and context - elevating the Squarespace foundation

Chêne Bleu's individual winery sites are built on Squarespace - a capable platform, but one that, by its nature, produces experiences that tend to converge on a recognisable type. The landing page, the interactive label experience, and the brand film do not replace those sites. They surround them. They give visitors a reason to arrive with anticipation rather than intention, and leave with a sense that they have encountered something genuinely singular.

This is the strategic logic of the work as a whole: where the Squarespace infrastructure provides reliability and manageability, our work provides distinction. The result is a digital estate that functions commercially and expresses the brand with the depth and originality it deserves - one that could not be mistaken, for even a moment, for any other wine producer in the world.

The Bunny Hunt

Embedded within the interactive experience is a secondary game: the bunny hunt.

Chêne Bleu's rabbits are a recurring motif across the estate's visual identity - they appear in the label, in the landscape, in the brand's wider storytelling - and we turned that motif into a playful discovery mechanic.

Hidden across the interactive illustration, a number of rabbits wait to be found. Locating them all becomes a reason to look everywhere, to slow down, to spend time in the brand's world rather than passing through it.

It is the kind of detail that says more about a brand than any amount of copy. It says: we don't take ourselves too seriously. We believe that wine should be fun. We think the best experiences are the ones that give you something to discover. All of which is entirely, perfectly Chêne Bleu.

Results and Impact

The work is live and ongoing - the group landing page remains in active development as the final pieces are brought together. Early response to the brand film and the interactive experience has been strong, with particular enthusiasm from trade partners for whom the work has served as a powerful introduction to the breadth and character of the Chêne Bleu world.

The interactive experience has extended time spent with the brand online - visitors who engage with it explore more of the site, spend longer with the content, and leave with a clearer sense of what makes Chêne Bleu different.

The bunny hunt, in particular, has generated organic social sharing from visitors who delight in finding - and telling others to find - all the hidden rabbits.

When the group landing page completes, it will for the first time give Chêne Bleu's three businesses a shared digital presence commensurate with their shared ambition. The work is designed to grow: as the group's story develops, the illustration world and the interactive mechanics provide a flexible, extensible platform on which new chapters can be written.

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