Fresh From The Field: Big Ag and game of more – By Bryce Groves x Pixelpush

3 months ago by Iris Kalff

What started with a scroll through the Fresh From The Field archives became an award-winning collaboration. Bryce Groves and Pixelpush joined forces to create Greenpeace Aotearoa’s Big Ag and Game of More campaign.

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing fresh and inspiring work from the Design Assembly community. Want to submit your work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the form here.

The brief

This project was a Design Assembly members collab at its best.

Greenpeace Aotearoa tasked me with overseeing and producing an animation to raise awareness of the role of “Big Ag” – aka industrial meat and dairy – in climate change and biodiversity loss. Big Ag often escapes scrutiny for its environmental effects by diverting the attention to the oil industry, or greenwashing and piecemeal sustainability efforts.

The animation had to strike a balance between information and entertainment, with a pace that suited a social media audience, while not glossing over the dark realities of mechanised consumption, greed and profiteering corporates. The storytelling also had to avoid being preachy; not demonising farmers, villainising animals, or guilt-tripping consumers.

Part of the brief was for a ‘modular’ approach that could be adapted easily by local Greenpeace offices in their own language. Avoiding any reliance on typography, and designed from the ground up for the voiceover to be easily changed out.

With all this in mind I crafted a deep and detailed written brief, the kind of brief I’d like to receive myself as a creative. But then the real trick was finding a local animation company that I could work with closely, who had a diverse portfolio of styles and problem-solving approaches, and could adapt to an NGO budget.

So I started surfing the Design Assembly Fresh from the Field archives, and came across Pixelpush. Not only did their portfolio immediately hit the spot, but their response to an RFP even came back with initial creative thinking, that really showed they understood the brief.

The design response

From the start Pixelpush led the ideation, bringing a fresh, character-driven approach to the big-picture themes.

The story plays out across two visual worlds. A gathering of familiar big villains; Big Tobacco, Big Oil, etc, and “the quiet one”, Big Ag – and a mobile-game-style universe where Big Ag’s appetite runs wild, ravaging the planet for a hi-score.

Part-way through the development, Pixelpush broached the tricky duality of having two ‘worlds’ both made through 2D animation. How could the two be clearly differentiated? Their solution was a charming, hand-made solution – stop-motion. Not only was it lovely to have such a craft-driven look, but it fit neatly in with the Greenpeace no-Generative-AI policy.

With Pixelpush focusing on the craft, pacing, sound design, and vibrancy of the visual worlds, that left me as a Creative Director some lovely space to zero in on getting nuances of the messaging, smaller details and VO script just right for Greenpeace and their kaupapa.

An unusual moment of creative direction was to deny Pixelpush’s initial design of the stop-motion characters as ethnically diverse and gender-balanced. Greenpeace was adamant that the “Bigs” of the world, especially Big Ag, are dominated by white males. So both Pixelpush and I had to put aside our normal standards of representation.

Beyond the hero animation piece, we created a small suite of cutdown versions for Reels. Plus, an ‘empty belly’ format where local Greenpeace offices around the world would be able to insert a piece-to-camera intro, to add their local context and voice. All supported by an online style guide and instructions.

At time of writing the animation has been run in Aotearoa, Spain and the Netherlands, and won a Silver Axis Award in 2026.