Giddy Up: Our 2022 rewind and rebrand

Feb 1

Put this in your pipe and smoke it: We are officially Huckleberry Studios! Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to find our style and voice, and our new brand reflects us better than ever. And of course, we wanted to pay homage to all the 2022 weddings that got us here. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

It all started last spring when we did a mentor session with John and Nick from How to Film Weddings. We can’t quote them directly, but upon looking through our website they basically said, “Your brand should be more fun.” And that put Alex into a headspace of, “OK… maybe there’s some things we should look at updating.”

And for awhile, it was just that. A color switch here, some wording changes there, but we were still Huckleberry Wedding Films. We still used the same logo, site design and accent color. It was fine. But it didn’t stand out.

And then we attended Calibrate 2022 and were BLOWN AWAY by the presentation on branding from Bottlebrush Films. They went super extra and did a whole pre-recorded video about injecting yourself into your brand. They talked about some other filmmakers they helped with brand discovery and that was about the time we decided to jump feet first into a complete overhaul of Huckleberry.

We started by writing to Grace and Andrew from Bottlebrush asking if maybe they would have the time to help us conceptualize a new brand. We said we liked spaghetti-westerns, that we wanted more Tombstone references on our site, some psychedelic inspiration and just more fun in general. And then when they wrote back, the psychedelic spaghetti-western concept was born.

We have to credit Grace and Andrew for so many of the fun ideas you see on our website. It was their idea to make all of our headings quotes from Tombstone and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, two of our favorite movies. They also suggested a version of our logo that was an old school movie poster and we about died. They wanted us to take inspiration from our favorite movie poster designs and some of our favorite psychedelic websites (Meow Wolf and Double Blind) and make it our own. And by utilizing Alex’s design skills, we wouldn’t have to go further than a styled headshot shoot and hiring an illustrator for our secondary elements and poster.

The logo and website were designed by Alex. All of the illustrations were a collaboration with Kirsty from Sungaze Studio in Scotland. The copy was written by Alex and Jim, reviewed by Bottlebrush Films. The branding photos were taken by Riley Glenn at Cactus Moon Lodge in Austin. Alex’s makeup was done by Katy Reddell and the horses were from XLR8 Ranch nearby. The video was shot by our friends at Carhart Photography and edited by Alex. The song is “Giddy Up” by wOW.NeAT.FuN.C0oL and was licensed through Marmoset. The launch reels we posted on IG were a collaboration between Alex & the oh-so-talented Grace from Bottlebrush. We can’t thank these people enough for helping make our rebrand as epic and awesome as it could possibly be.

And if you’re interested in collaborating with us on brand design, let us know! We’re super interested in making logo design, copywriting and website builds part of our services.