Click 3x has completed the graphics package for the 2004 AICP Show, The Art & Technique of the American Television Commercial. The studios creative team, headed by creative director/designer Susan Armstrong, created a 50-second opener for the show as well as more than two-dozen graphics introducing awards categories. Click 3xs show opener follows a young creative as he strolls through an urban landscape and finds inspiration in non-assuming features of the environment like the bricks of a crumbling wall and the plywood barrier of a construction site.
We looked for a simple way to show how creative people come up with ideas, explained Armstrong. Advertising creatives find inspiration in unusual places.
After developing the concept and preparing storyboards, Armstrong took a small crew to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to shoot the live-action sequences on digital video. We chose Williamsburg because it can look like any city in America, said Armstrong. The most challenging aspect to the production was finding the right locations. We looked for sites that had simple clean lines and had some one detail that we could work with.
Back at Click 3xs studio, the project proceeded through editorial, visual effects, animation and graphics. Armstrong drew textural elements from paper that had gone through a malfunctioning photocopier and applied them to images of the ad creative to achieve a degraded, gritty quality. The team applied a similar aesthetic to the category headers. Like the opener, each one features iconic urban imagery and a makes a humorous reference to the awards category. The graphic for the cinematography category, for example, has typography spilling from the lens of a surveillance camera.
The graphics are tied together by the bright colors that we used, Armstrong observed. The colors act as a framing device for the gritty look, and give it polish, as if we had taken the gritty urban images off the street and put them in an art gallery.
It was an honor to be chosen by (AICP president) Matt Miller and (AICP Show chairperson) Joanne Ferraro for this project, added Click 3x exec producer Jason Mayo. Its a pleasure to work with people who understand and respect the creative process, and were very supportive to our team.
Credits for Click 3x go to Armstrong, creative director/designer; Iain Greenway, creative director; Eve Lim, Rob Roth and Zack Kinney, designers; Rob Campbell, editor; Dan Gray, videographer; Jan Cilliers and Mark Szumski, Flame artists; Jim Collins, Tom Hurlburt, Kristen Pedersen and Anthony Filipakis, animators; Jason Mayo, executive producer; Lana Aklilu, producer. Original music for the show open was composed by Michael Montes of Sacred Noise, New York.
The AICP Show debuted June 14, 2004 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, attracting more than 1,500 members of the art, advertising and production communities. It will tour other U.S. and foreign cities this summer and fall.
Click 3X provides visual effects, computer animation and broadcast design services to the advertising and television industries. The studio is located at 16 West 22nd Street, New York, New York 10010. For more information, visit www.click3X.com.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
