Christian Williams

For this season of Man vs. Wild we wanted to highlight the fact that off camera, Bear is very much the same as his on-screen persona. He isn”t just trying to survive. He’s trying to live. And from the list of his accomplishments, he’s succeeding. I worked with Jason Gamm on this one. He’s a talented young designer out of Milwaukee with a really interesting ‘collage’ style, that was exactly what I was looking for. In the end, this wound up being one of my favorite pieces of the year. Spend some time looking at this one closely if you’ve got the time. Lots of nice little details.

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In less than a week, we were asked to concept and create a facebook application for The Colony. I handled the art direction and design, one of our wunderkid interns handled the build. The application challenges you to identify what 6 friends would you choose to help you rebuild your world in the event of a disaster. After your selections are made, it generates a story for each member of your Colony.  If you’re ready, build your own Colony here. Aside from the man hours, we turned this unit out for $30. (the price for the background music)

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There is an upcoming show on Discovery called The Colony. It’s a great concept involving post apocalyptic survival. Will the show stand the test of time and be a success…we’ll have to wait and see. For the poster I picked up the super cool title treatment done by Prologue and then worked in some production photography.

If you happen to be driving along the WSH in NYC this next month chances are you won’t miss this.

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As with any campaign the size of Shark Week, there are a ton of good ideas that never see the light of day.  This one came about one afternoon when I was brainstorming with Scott McDonald of RPA Associates and Luke (Assoc Art Director here).  The juxtaposition of such a mundane sentence along with the horror inspired typography really struck a chord with me.  This was the concept that I felt best captured that “It can happen when you least expect it” vibe.  Throughout nearly this entire campaign, Luke was my hands for this project and by the end Luke was a mad wizard with bloody type.  This was an early draft…and not nearly as incredible as it would have wound up.

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FEAR© This idea came from our copywriter Andrew Heckel.  The idea that Shark Week could own fear was a great one. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t get the powers at be to rally behind it.

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Esquire came to us a while back with an opportunity to be the first to use their new ‘flap’ cover. The flap worked so seemlessly within our One Way Out online campaign (keep your eye on espn.com) that we jumped at the chance. Take a look at what the NY Times has to say about the article.

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Shot Escapologist Jonathan Goodwin in several scenarios involving ropes, chains, duct tape and cramped boxes all to create a really fun campain involving Jonathan and his crazy imagination. Rube Goldberg…meet Jonathan Goodwin. More images from this campaign as we roll them out.

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Jonathan likes to escape from boxes, web banners are essentially boxes. Eureka…let’s put Jonathan in a box and animate it all while staying true to our fun illustrated style. I wrapped Jonathan in an extension cord, added some fake sparks, and some fake water…and of course some fake Wil E. Coyote style electrocution. It was all good fun. For the synced units we animated the contraption and had the top banner fill the bottom banner with water. Luke Watkins really worked hard at executing this idea for us. These are really worth checking out. So I urge you to click on the image.