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Mobile gaming giant Supercell came to us with a simple brief: to engage the community of one of their best games with over 100 million downloads, Brawl Stars. Its players are young, passionate and creative. They’re also inundated with competitor games every single day! Our job is to keep them engaged with the world of Brawl Stars and keep them playing and collaborating together, so we decided to set them a creative challenge like no other.

The Idea

The Brawl Stars players just love fan art – it’s a BIG part of the community. We wanted to harness their creativity with a massive fan art challenge. The ask? To colour in one still frame of an animation, which we would stitch together into a massive, community-made film, built from the very best entries. Then, we’d give those who were featured real in-game rewards.

What We Did

Working with our in-house animation studio, This Thing of Ours, we crafted a film crammed full of action – making any frame that the community chose interesting and worthy of their time. Our action-packed, black and white, frame-by-frame animation showed some of the most popular Brawl Stars characters in action. To make sure each entry would be seen clearly in the final film, the frame rate was dropped to 12 f/s, allowing players to scroll through and admire each individual work of art.

We then dropped the B&W frames in batches on Reddit, over five weeks, with nudges across owned social media channels. The community chose their favourite frame, coloured it in however they wanted, then re-shared it back on the channel. Then, after careful consideration, we made our shortlist of 297 frames (from at least 3 times as many entries) and stitched the final film together. All featured players took home 100 Gems, and we even had a credit sequence that gave everyone who took part a shout-out.

“This ticked all the right boxes. This was my favourite community project and we’re really proud of the finished video.” - Ryan Lighton, Community Manager at Brawl Stars.

The Results

The end product blew us away. And so did the engagement! With over 2.1 million organic YouTube views, 98% likes, supremely high audience retention (72% average viewed), and countless comments asking when the next challenge would start, the players loved it.