The brief

Following directly on from the successful delivery of the City Surfers display advertising campaign, Canon tasked us with the conception and development of a one-off, high-impact creative for a Masthead placement on YouTube's homepage, that would also need to be duplicated and transcreated for the French and German markets.

The challenge

Working to a tight deadline, the challenge was to come up with 3 unique concepts for the client to choose from, and get them reviewed, refined, approved and built in a matter of days. Each concept had to be different enough from the existing rich media placements so as to constitute something unique, but also had to be close enough to fit seamlessly with the tone of the rest of the campaign - quite a delicate balance to strike!

Action taken

Taking full advantage of DoubleClick's custom YouTube components, and the increased capacity that they afforded us for video, we proposed an attention-grabbing, full-bleed video intro sequence with an animated transition to one of 3 different interactive end frames: a video selector, featuring interviews with the surfers, photographers and production team; an image gallery with downloadable artwork; or a scrollable scene that would reveal information about the surfers, the shoot and the products as the viewer explored.

My role

As the lead designer on the project, my role was to come up with the ideas, work the concepts up into a set of polished storyboards to present to the client, implement any conceptual feedback, and produce the assets that would be used for the build (including the crop for the intro video sequence). (At one one point I was having to cut around surf and water spray to creats the assets for the transition - you can probably imagine how much fun that was!)

During the development phase my role then switched to that of art and animation director. Being DoubleClick certified, I was also heavily involved with interpretting and implementing QA feedback and with the upload and trafficking process.