the brief.
Ernest Packaging is a family business built on its founders’ legacy of care and respect, and its culture platform rests on three pillars: Values, CURE, and Connectology. Most corporate culture programs live in slide decks and lobby posters, seen once at onboarding and never again. Ernest and Liquid Agency, who owned strategy, script, and storyboards, wanted the opposite: the Dream Division, a fantastical headquarters where each pillar gets its own floor and the company’s roster of franchise characters has a home. Our job was to produce it as four films, a long-form anthem and three one-minute episodes, at commercial quality, without a cartoon studio’s budget or calendar.
the challenge.
A dozen franchise characters, from a robot host to a corgi, a jackalope, a sasquatch, a wolf, and a sheep, had to share one coherent animated world and match scripts and storyboards that were entirely Liquid’s. The production friction was constant and specific: keeping character mouths in sync with their voice tracks, performance notes down to a single entrance (Frankie, the corgi who reigns as queen of the Values floor, bounced into frame when the moment called for regal), project files that scaled past 36 GB, and missing source assets and font dependencies to chase down mid-sprint. The whole run, concept to final cut, fit inside five weeks.
the process.
Liquid refined the concept across seven rounds before production locked; the territory that survived turned the Dream from an idea into a place. We came in as the production layer beneath it: pre-visualization and concept imagery against Liquid’s boards, AI-generated characters and environments, human voice performances synced to the on-screen generated characters with Hedra, an original score, and the edit and grade. Reviews ran through per-shot feedback logs. Every note mapped to a shot list and a costed level of effort, so a nine-shot fix to Frankie’s crown could be scoped, approved, and turned around inside the sprint.
the solution.
a division, not a deck.
The Dream Division gives each pillar its own floor: a Values floor with the company’s five values on a neon wall, a CURE floor of colourful circles, and a Connectology floor with a boardroom and a command-centre video wall. An elevator with an endless tower of buttons connects them, and chevrons fly out of the division and across the country to land on real Ernest locations, tying the fantasy back to the actual company.
compositing at cartoon scale.
The heavy lift sat in After Effects: rotoscoping and masking, puppet tools and CC Power Pins for character rigs, and keying trees built from Keylight, Advanced Spill Suppressor, and Key Cleaner to blend green-screen character plates into AI-generated environments, with camera lens blurs and chromatic aberration unifying the look. The command centre’s monitor wall alone was a 42-file composite. Single project files routinely carried 17 to 36 GB of active source.
voices with a human read.
Every character is voiced by a human actor. Hedra synced those performances to the on-screen generated characters, and where mouths drifted from the track, sync was rebuilt shot by shot, because a cartoon world only holds together if the characters feel alive inside it.
the outcome.
The Dream Division series won a Silver ADDY in the Internal Communications category: juried proof that internal communications can be as creatively ambitious as external campaigns. Four films went from concept to final cut in five weeks, at one-third the cost of a traditional 3D animation pipeline. And because the production was built as a repeatable, multi-variant generative content system (shared floors, a recurring host, and a sitcom-style title sequence), Ernest can commission new episodes as the culture platform grows.