East Street Lanes is a little different. On the surface, it’s Leicester city centre’s boutique bowling alley, but dig even a little deeper and you’ll find the home of truly crazy crazy golf. Everything about ESL is built to be attention grabbing, a bit nuts and out-of-this-world.
So, when the bowling alley was set to reopen on American Independence Day in 2020, Arch Creative jumped at the opportunity to create a high-concept, out-there video with an extra-terrestrial theme.
At Arch Creative, we believe that the best agencies are proactive agencies. When we learned that East Street Lanes were reopening on such an iconic date, we knew we had to take advantage and create something to get the most out of the relaunch.
Our concept had an alien visitor (in the form of a giant bowling bowl) landing in Leicester and causing havoc in the streets as it made its way to the East Street Lanes location.
A high-concept idea is all well and good, but you need the expertise to pull it off. Our in-house animators at Arch relish a challenge, and created an effects-driven film with a side of humour. We included the central CGI bowling ball, complete with an eerie, unearthly glow, glitch effects to denote alien interference and some (virtual) damage to Leicester scenery.
In addition to our effects, we enlisted the help of ESL staff and a few other local Leicester businesses for acting support. This was a job with a tight turnaround time given the scope, and drove huge amounts of business to ESL on the first days of opening.