Brewtalist

Bitter, But Better

Project Category / Short Film

Service / Product Animation

Role / Art Direction, Story boarding, Animation, Lighting, Compositing, Rendering

Project Category / Short Film

Service / Product Animation

Role / Art Direction, Story boarding, Animation, Lighting, Compositing, Rendering

Bitter, But Better

A coffee brand that treats clarity as craft. Minimal design, maximal precision, and a wry voice that’s funny but serious. Brewtalist is ritual as engineering: sharp, tasteful, and honest. The coffee is uncompromising; the voice is quietly proud.

A 25-second motion loop that treats coffee as a thing of function and feeling - not a lifestyle prop. No people. No fuss. Just cups, beans, and a ritual that reads like a verdict.

The Brief

Create a fast, scroll-stopping loop that makes coffee feel precise, powerful and a little mischievous. The film was aimed to live on feeds and product pages - short, perfectly loopable, and all about the coffee.

The creative idea

Turn the elements of a coffee ritual into a small cinematic world where objects carry meaning: cups stack like arguments, beans replace containers, grounds become weather. Match-cuts and micro-transitions make the action feel inevitable — like each frame is the next correct step toward clarity.

Shot list & creative notes (how it plays)

Three cups stacked
A tidy vertical stack on a white plane. Clean, architectural framing: light grazing the rim, extreme clarity on ceramic texture. The stack is an iconic “start” - ritual architecture.

Stack slides open
The stack slips, plates reveal interior detail, then splits apart with precise motion. This is the first micro-reveal - the ritual coming undone just enough to begin.

Cup title → match cut to beans in place of cups
The outer base of the cup reads the product name; the camera tracks and then match cuts that rim into a cluster of beans, positioned and lit where the cups were. The cups literally become beans - transformation as metaphor.

Beans and cups grid
A geometry of repetition: alternating beans and cups in a perfect grid. Negative space and rhythm emphasize the brand’s minimal order.

A spiral of cups
The grid collapses into a spiraling arrangement: rotation, perspective sweep, tension building toward motion.

Bean exploding in slow-mo
A single bean fractures outward in a slow, dignified bloom - fragments, shards, and micro-fissures. Motion is sculptural, like a slow-motion punctuation mark.

Close-up of the explosion
Macro detail of the fractured surface: interior grain, oily microgloss, tiny dust motes. Texture is everything here.

Grounded coffee spinning like a tornado → particles twist back to form a cup → loop to beginning
Grounds whirl in a controlled tornado, then the particle field collapses and recomposes into the original cup stack — seamless loop achieved by choreography and geometry. The final frame resolves into the original composition.

Stack slides open
The stack slips, plates reveal interior detail, then splits apart with precise motion. This is the first micro-reveal - the ritual coming undone just enough to begin.

Beans and cups grid
A geometry of repetition: alternating beans and cups in a perfect grid. Negative space and rhythm emphasize the brand’s minimal order.

A spiral of cups
The grid collapses into a spiraling arrangement: rotation, perspective sweep, tension building toward motion.

Bean exploding in slow-mo
A single bean fractures outward in a slow, dignified bloom - fragments, shards, and micro-fissures. Motion is sculptural, like a slow-motion punctuation mark.

Close-up of the explosion
Macro detail of the fractured surface: interior grain, oily microgloss, tiny dust motes. Texture is everything here.

Highlights and Details

Technical Approach

Technical approach — what we actually did

One toolchain: Blender (concept → modeling → lookdev → animation → render → edit → sound design). Entirely produced in Blender to keep iteration tight and files portable.

Geometry Nodes, not simulations: All exploding shots, the tornado, and closeups were achieved with Geometry Nodes setups. No particle/physics simulations were used - instead we relied on procedural geometry manipulation for deterministic, controllable motion. This allowed precise timing for match-cuts and loop continuity and saved render time.

Custom GeoNodes Bean Generator: Built a modular generator with procedural textures and shape controls so every bean could be tweaked (size, seam, oiliness, tilt). The tool produced final geometry and also baked per-bean variation maps for shading.

Materials & lookdev: Procedural PBR stacks for skin, oil, dust and micro-normal detail. Multiple layered maps (roughness variation, micro-spec, sub-surface tint) to give beans believable interior and exterior.

Animation technique: Motion created via fields/attribute animation in GeoNodes - curl forces, twist attributes and controlled offsets replaced heavy sims. This meant the tornado and fragments behaved like particles visually, but as pure geometry that could be read, reversed, and remapped for perfect looping.

Rendering & compositing: Render passes exported for fine control in Blender’s compositor (beauty, z, crypto-matte, motion vectors when needed). Color treatment focused on stark black/white backgrounds with warm brown accent passes for the coffee tones.

Sound design: Layered in Blender’s VSE - clicks, cracks and rattles. No music; sound punctuates and sells the tactile quality.

Deliverable: 25s loop, feed-ready, optimized file sizes for social, with a clean loop point.