Beyond the Wall

The Challenge

Mountain Dew (via Frucor) wanted young New Zealanders to take passion past the usual brand surface — to push a craft they already cared about further. The answer was Beyond the Wall: collaborate with graffiti artist Kairau “Haser” Bradley, turn motion-captured painting into a real 3.5 m fibreglass sculpture in an Auckland alleyway, and recreate that 3D graffiti craft online so anyone could draw a piece and drop it onto Google Street View anywhere in the world.

The web experience had to feel like a real graffiti tool — mouse drawing with control over shape, style, fatness, gloss, and colour — then persist creations into a global Street View canvas and support a competition with a $20k prize judged by Haser.

Client & collaborators

Creative direction sat with Colenso BBDO (Auckland). Engineering delivery for the Flex application was through Fugitive, where I worked as lead front-end developer alongside Paul Sanderson (custom 3D engine) and Mike Delucchi. Brand client was Frucor’s Mountain Dew NZ.

Creative process

Offline, Haser’s painting was motion-captured and rebuilt as a physical sculpture installed downtown. Online, that idea became a browser tool: craft a virtual graffiti bomb, refine surface and colour, then place it on Street View — from local streets to landmarks worldwide. Supporting film and webisodes documented the capture → sculpture path and drove people to the site; a TV/cinema spot showed Haser dropping the finished piece and pointed fans to mountaindew.co.nz.

Constraints

• Flex application architecture on pureMVC with enough structure for a complex creative tool, not a one-off Flash microsite.
• Realtime 3D drawing, shading, and rendering owned in a custom engine that had to stay tightly coupled to the UI and save/share flows.
• Extensive back-end needs: user creations, competition entry, and Google Street View placement as a single global canvas.
• Dual story — physical sculpture / roadshow activations and a home browser experience that had to sell the same idea.
• Browser-era Flash delivery with performance and UX expectations of a consumer soft-drink campaign.

Contributions

1. Led front-end development — owned the Flex site built on the pureMVC framework, from application structure through the interactive graffiti authoring UI.
2. Partnered on the custom 3D engine — worked directly with Paul Sanderson, who built the engine for drawing, shading, and rendering, to wire those capabilities into the shipped experience.
3. Shipped extensive back-end functionality — creation persistence, competition flows, and the plumbing that let users drop pieces onto Google Street View as part of the live campaign.

Outcomes

Beyond the Wall launched in late 2012 as Mountain Dew NZ’s 3D graffiti campaign. Reported results included strong participation (about 24% of the target tried the software), Facebook engagement growth of roughly 293%, and sales lift for the flavour push in a declining category. The work later placed in Warc’s Top 100 and won Creative Effectiveness at Spikes Asia (2014).

The original mountaindew.co.nz Flex experience is long gone — typical of that runtime — but campaign films and contemporary case studies still document the idea and the live activations.

Project dates

Mid 2011 – late 2012 · Auckland, New Zealand
Agency delivery: Fugitive · Creative: Colenso BBDO · Artist: Kairau “Haser” Bradley