Supercell Brawl Stars Starr Park CCTV
2024
To celebrate Brawl Stars' fifth anniversary, we tag-teamed with Supercell to breathe life into the game's enigmatic origin story. The resulting project nabbed trophies at Cannes Lions, D&AD, and many more. Anyone who has played the game will tell you that Brawl Stars is set in a defunct theme park — but what exactly happened there? How did Starr Park meet its demise? And why the heck is everyone fighting?
Through a mysterious time portal hidden within the game’s home screen, we transported users back to 1995 to answer these questions and more.
With a groundbreaking, real-time, round-the-clock livestream that played continuously for 42 days (!), we crafted an interactive space designed to look like Starr Park’s security room, complete with a wall of surveillance cameras.
We animated 18 original narrative scenes, each told from multiple camera angles, to explain the Brawl Stars’ backstory — how and why the Brawlers got so angry and, importantly, why they keep coming back to life. (Spoiler alert: It’s the magic crystals.)
We implemented Unreal crowd simulations to execute the 24/7 broadcast, incorporating day-to-night cycles, weather patterns, and increasing levels of destruction.
In addition, we generated over 30,000 unique background character variations whose panic levels escalated exponentially throughout the experience. As Starr Park slowly met its demise, the crowd reacted with ever greater hysterics to the perilous hazards emerging all around them.
We designed the whole world from the ground up, taking cues from pre-established Brawl Stars environments and expanding them to build a more immersive, atmospheric experience anchored in our retro, ‘90s-inspired CCTV stylization.
The computer terminal in our fictional surveillance room stored recordings of each critical story moment. Players could access them as they uncovered and deciphered secret time codes.
This ongoing scavenger hunt generated tons of engagement from the Brawl Stars’ community as players shared clues on message boards with each other to try to uncover the mysteries of Starr Park.
The control room changed daily, with new props appearing in the room and new entries added to the security logbook which documented the park’s descent into madness. Concerned guests left messages on the answering machine about the ensuing chaos.
Fans created Reddit threads, Twitter debates, and discussion forums on message boards.
Ultimately, the experience received over 89 million views, and fans created 8,500 videos about the experience, generating over 130 million additional views from the community.
BUCK
Group Creative Director
Joe Mullen
Thomas Schmid
Executive Producer
Kirsten Collabolletta
Luisa Murray
Producer
HJ Kim
David Guti Rosado
Paul Winze
Production Coordinator
Celine Nguyen
Head of 3D / 3D Supervisor
Alex Dingfelder
Art Director
Morgan Schweitzer
Animation Lead
Peter DeSalvo
Tyler Lancaster
Director of Creative Technology
Cameron Browning
2D Animation Lead
Juan Ricardo Hernandez
Lead Creative Technologist
Matt Kenefick
Kirin Robinson
Storyboard
Tristyn Pease
Stephen Loveluck
Mike Bertino
Design
Alex Kiesling
Dan Muangprasert
Jamiel Law
Julia Mattos
Marcus Collins
Matthew Kam
Shannon Rollins
Joe Dennis
Technical Director
Ben Rohel
Look Development
Alfonso Petersen
Anita Kang
Compositing
Ben Rohel
Drew Wiebe
Nick Knezvich
Sana Srinivasan
3D Animation
Hillary McCarthy
Michael Bahurinsky
Cel Animation
Tinghe Yang
Junyi Xiao
Matt Deans
Shelby Chan
Tucker Klein
Creative Technologist
Haysie Chung
Charlie Whitney