Designing for Halloween: Amrit Birdi brings horror icons to Fanta
How the UK illustrator brought Freddy Fazbear, Michael Myers and Chucky to supermarket shelves - plus his 560-page comic passion project
This October, Fanta’s limited-edition Halloween cans brought Freddy Fazbear from Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, M3GAN 2.0, Michael Myers from Halloween, Chucky, and The Grabber from Black Phone 2 into UK supermarkets, proof that horror IP can work in mainstream retail without losing its edge. The campaign coincides with Universal Pictures and Blumhouse releasing two new chapters of their popular franchises: Black Phone 2 and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
The illustrator behind the range is Amrit Birdi, whose journey from self-published comics to Disney, Netflix and Ubisoft makes him a natural fit for a brief that could easily go wrong: make R-rated and mature-game characters supermarket-friendly while keeping them instantly recognisable.
We discuss how he balanced Universal Pictures and Blumhouse’s IP requirements with Coca-Cola’s brand guidelines, and the realities of printing character-led line art on aluminium, from simplifying shapes to controlling line weights so they reproduce crisply on a can.
I’m P M Buchan. From Plymouth, Devon, I cover dark culture across every medium, spanning literature, art, film, music, theatre and immersive experiences. I’m a former columnist for Starburst and SCREAM magazines. I’ve written for Times Literary Supplement, Bleeding Cool, and Lionsgate Fright Club and been interviewed by Rue Morgue and Kerrang!. As a comic-book writer, I’ve also collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, and award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith.
This week in IF YOU GO AWAY I interview artist Amrit Birdi and revisit the work of directors Matt Fitch and Chris Baker to reveal their new short horror film, The Trick.
From Comics to Coca-Cola: The Fanta Halloween project
How did the Fanta collaboration come about?
“It actually came about through an agency connection from years ago. Two people from that agency moved to a new company and we kept in touch through LinkedIn. One of them reached out with this project. The client wanted to make sure they were bringing in the right person. I put together a quick mood board, proof of concept art to give a vibe and it was about six weeks of iterating these characters.”
Were you given free rein with the character selection, or was this predetermined?
“They had a good idea of who they wanted. I think it was between the brands that were deciding. Fanta, which is Coca-Cola owned, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse. I believe Fanta do something like this every year, or for previous years they’ve brought in a set of characters from a movie IP and used them for a Halloween campaign.
“In terms of control of what was being drawn, there was an agency, there were the brands, and there were probably loads of other people as well. I was pretty much told who to draw and what to draw, but I did have creative control as to how they were depicted, input on the visual style and what might work. One of the big considerations from the get-go was how artwork is translated onto an aluminium can and how that’s printed, because the translation between line artwork printed onto that kind of material can be a little bit jarring. I think there’s a slight colour step or an overlap. It creates this weird effect. We had to be careful with the line artwork to make it super crisp and keep the shapes as simple as possible, while still looking engaging.”
Navigating horror IP and brand guidelines
With Universal, Blumhouse, Coca-Cola and agencies involved, how did you navigate all those stakeholders?
“There was lots of back and forth discussing which character represents which flavour. You’ve got fun-loving Fanta, and then you’ve got these quite dark characters. How do you marry those up? How are they depicted in a way that resonates with the fan bases and then also is appropriate for an all ages drink? That was probably the hardest balancing act.
“A lot of the decisions were made early on, then from the 30 to 40% mark it was iterating. It was making sure that the nose was right, or the colour was right, experimenting with different colours. It was never set as to how they would look, we were finding that out as we were going through the process.”
I don’t have a lot of experience with the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, but that one’s my favourite of the designs. Which characters proved the most challenging to capture?
“Freddy Fazbear and M3GAN 2.0, the robot, were the ones that were probably iterated the most. I think that M3GAN 2.0 was probably the hardest to capture. And then Freddy is a very visually unique character. There was a lot of attention paid to representing him in a way that people would recognise.
“It sounds like it should be easy to do. He’s an orange bear thing with a hat. At the same time, because he’s so specific and so nuanced, that made it slightly harder. But yeah, I’m really pleased with the way they came out.”
Career-defining work and creative evolution
This seems like a career-defining project. How does it rank against your other high-profile work?
“I’ve been fortunate enough to create work that’s been seen by quite a lot of people. At some point, you feel like this is another project. For example, I’d just come off the back of doing a book with TommyInnit, who has 15 million followers on YouTube (great guy, by the way). Then the Fanta gig came up, and again, I’m going to move on to the next thing.
“But really, I think when the range of cans launched, and maybe for the first time ever, my grandparents might know what I do for a job. I was like, ‘This is maybe a big deal.’ And this is maybe the most eyeballs that I’ve had on my work. Success is subjective though. One person’s success is another normal day at the office. If you scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final, you’d be really happy, but I don’t know if it would light you up if that wasn’t the achievement in life you wanted to get to.
“Professionalism in this industry means delivering work to the same high standard regardless of your personal connection to the subject matter. Luckily, this Fanta, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse project was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring some very cool characters to life, which really helped me to bring my A-game.”
You’ve come a long way from the comic convention circuit where we met. How did you evolve from comics to this full-stack creative role?
“Comics was where it started, but it was an exploration phase. I was always interested in telling stories visually. Everyone wants to pursue their dreams, maybe drawing Batman or something. That was short-lived for me. Coming from a graphic design background, when I contrasted the two worlds, there was so much more money in commercial artwork. I got disillusioned if I’m completely honest. I didn’t see a way to live the life I wanted by just doing comics.”
“An opportunity came up to work with a YouTuber and book publisher on a graphic novel, which looked like it could be the best of both worlds. That book, Joe Sugg’s Username: Evie, ended up being a bestseller and the fastest selling graphic novel since records began. When you do one thing, you get known for that one thing. That’s really how it started. My name was in all sorts of outlets, including the BBC. That level of visibility took me into this terrain where I could access all of these other things with illustration.
“I didn’t consciously decide, but what came to me was this commercial work outside of comics, but in a comic style. And I doubled down on it. Totally leaned into it then pivoted into video games, pivoted into advertising, pivoted into animation and skill stacked. I took the same set of skills to different industries. I hired people to help me do the projects so I was able to take on more projects and a bigger body of work (amco-studio.com).”
Comic-book audiences are so small in the UK, it’s almost like being a poet. How do you think about making work that reaches beyond the creator community?
“I speak generally, and it’s not the case for everyone, but I do find the artists or the creators that I have spoken to, a lot of them focus on pleasing the creator crowd. They’re not focused on the buying audience. They’re focused on being perceived or doing things that are good for the other creators - I guess it’s like peer approval more than serving an audience. And like I say, not exclusively, but I’ve noticed it enough for me to make a comment about it.”
I know too many people still in comics who can’t pay the bills. Yes, be an artist, but I don’t want to see anybody who I respect starving for their art.
“Yeah, the starving artist… Creativity is so hard to monetise. I think what might happen is that creators produce the art that makes them happy. That’s creative expression, and that is art. But then to try and combine that with monetising it as a product, that’s luck of the draw. Is the thing you love to produce the thing that the market wants?
“If I hadn’t gone to the publisher for my first graphic novel with a team in place to propose a game plan on how to produce 180 pages in 12 weeks, I’d never have gotten that shot. Me today might have said no to that, but 24, 25-year-old me said yes to that.
“To be consistently successful, you need to turn your art, process or style into a product and brand that adds value, that people want to buy.”
Rid of You: A 560-page passion project
Tell me about Rid of You, your personal project that raised $50,000 on Kickstarter. Where did it come from and how hard was it to get over the line?
“By 2019, I’d been doing commercial projects for about six years and wanted to do something for myself. I wanted to tell a human story about common themes we all face. This one was about holding on versus letting go, and the way that holding on for too long can create dire circumstances.
“During COVID lockdowns I had a lot of free time for the first time in years. I wasn’t out at meetings. I wasn’t going to publishers or to clients. That’s when this story that started off as a 100-page concept began to flow. I slowly started to shape it.
“I brought someone in. I’ve worked with Maddie Savage for years. She helped me on lots of projects and she’s a writer, so she came in and helped me shape the story into five issues, which is 100-120 pages. And then I took that and read it and she’d done a really good job. But at the same time it almost felt like we were rushing through the story. I wanted to do this story justice because it had been in the works for so long. So what started off as 120 pages I then took and significantly expanded it, and it’s now 560 pages across three volumes.”
How did you produce 560 pages while maintaining commercial work?
“I was working on it for quite a long time. Sometimes, I hired artists to help me with the colour flatting and backgrounds. I drew all the characters. I’ve spent years as an art director hiring teams, setting the style, and the principle of the project. So the line weights, the palette, and then how we’re going to shade it or color and the overall style. So I’m able to roll those things out quite easily across a team of artists if needed.
“I’ve accrued such a large body of work over 10 years. Background artwork that never got used because the licence expired. I do artwork licensing to clients that expired and they never renewed, they may no longer have use for the art or may no longer be operating, and the artwork rights revert to me. So I’ve utilised those things and built almost a library of assets. I’ve got trees, I’ve got deserts, I’ve got buildings, and there’s a phrase in video game production referred to as photo bashing, but it’s fundamentally montaging things together. So I can create a background quickly by throwing together assets, painting over, colour grading it, by using the match colour tool in Photoshop. And it makes a background that should take five, six hours to paint, 40 minutes maybe, super quick.
“It’s no secret as to how it’s produced, but I’m able to do about anywhere between 30 to 50 of those frames per day. Which is about, it sounds broad, but anywhere between two and 10 pages a day.”
Production methods and AI in creative work
That’s manga studio methodology.
“Exactly. Bring in a team, create recyclable assets. There’s libraries of heads. Literally, I’ll draw six, there’s only so many ways you can draw a head. So I’ll do a library of heads and I can blank faces. And I’ll be able to change those slightly and draw them onto bodies and it saves so much time.
“Imagine if we were to take this manual process and then you use a custom AI model to exponentially increase your own output based on the artwork styles that you have, your styles. So a library of heads with a custom model trained. If I can already be this productive without AI, imagine what an artist plus AI could achieve. And that’s where I think it’s an interesting tool to amplify an artist’s ability. Never to replace, but to amplify. We’ll always be able to use a tool like that way better than any non-artist, hands down. So you need to know the rules. I think those who don’t pay attention are really going to lose out in the long run.”
From Marvel and anime to animation dreams
I’m interested in who or what influenced you to get to the place you’re at now. Was there something that you saw or visited or heard as a kid that was like, “Wow, I want to create”?
“I think I’m more of a visual person. I used to read a lot as a kid, but I like to see things move. I was fascinated with how things moved and that actually translated into a fascination with animation. I was taken aback with something like the animated Spider-Man series, how many frames it took to make an episode. Was it something like 80,000 frames? I had a book, I can’t quite remember, but it was an insane amount of drawings over months to make one episode. I used to get annoyed at that show because they recycled artwork quite a bit. But after I read this fact, I was like, ‘you guys recycle away’. That might be where I developed some of my recycling techniques from.
“In terms of what inspired me to follow this, I think Marvel and anime in equal measure. Dragon Ball Z, those kinds of things. Akira, Ghost in the Shell, they inspired me in a big way. You always start off wanting to emulate the things that you see and then you outgrow that and then they echo in your work but it becomes its own thing.”
What would be your dream project now?
“There’s no character I’d like to draw that would inspire me more than my own right now. I want to move into full motion animation with my stories. But there is one thing – I’m obsessed with Final Fantasy VIII, the game. I’d love nothing more than to have some hand in creating a sequel, whether comic or animation format.
“I only played that game because I was 13 and I tried to rent Resident Evil 4 from Blockbuster and the guy was like, ‘No, you’re too young.’ So I rented Final Fantasy VIII instead, on a whim. I played it for 16 hours that weekend, to my mother’s dismay. I became obsessed with it.
“Those characters… I’ve actually got a sequel written that I’m going to create as one of my projects in the shadow of Final Fantasy, as a way to bring it to life. I did try and go through to Square Enix to pitch something, but apparently nothing Final Fantasy leaves Japan. So it’s probably a no-go, but that’s the dream.”
The Trick – New short horror film from Fitch/Baker
When I interviewed Fitch/Baker last month, The Trick was still in post-production. Now it’s loose in the world, a dark, stylish short about deception, magick and the price of ambition. Watch their new film below.
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