Rob Dunlavey - New Work: New Client� end of the road

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New Work: New Client� end of the road

posted:May 11, 2006

A still from the finished commercial. As this guy is typing away the colored shapes start fluttering off screen right. Some stair steps appear and we wipe into the next clip to some narration: "�your brilliant plan, your staggering proposal."

Well, all good things must come to an end. The Hewlett-Packard "Anthem" commercial I contributed designs for debuted the other night: I just reviewed it on-line and it's interesting now comparing my original work that went into it and the actual final production. I had been warned by the creative directors at Motion Theory who produced the piece. They said that the client "made a few changes".

Oh well, Motion Theory was inspired by my contribution and say they want to work together again. At some point they plan to produce their own version of the commercial for their demo reel. I can't wait to see it!

My original sketch before I was too aware of the flow or content of the project.

An early painting based on very minimal (I think intentional) art direction: go for suggestive shapes, movement, limited color and textures.

Jesus de Francisco was a marvelous creative director to work with. He suggested that I begin to create very ambiguous shapes (somewhere he mentioned "cut paper") and this sketch was one of the results:

Here is a sample from the film. Some of the shapes look sort of recognizable but the texture and mood is gone and the palette has been changed. In all fairness, I've only seen the commercial in a tiny QuickTime window so I may be missing a lot of the subtler aspects of the animation.

There were some windmill shapes percolating through the process and these would get emphasized at the end of the commercial. Here's my sketch where I tried to suggest a different space and leave room for circular animation of the wind vanes.