Learn how to be a stunt driver, shoot your scenes, take home your movie trailer.
Go Faster is an immersive movie-marking experience where you are taught how to drift, J-turn, and hand-brake park, by the business' finest. Then you're filmed doing it - putting you into a Hollywood style movie trailer called Go Faster, where you play the part of the getaway driver - ‘Wheels’.
This is a brand level piece of work putting you at the heart of an experience, not the product. The strategy behind this work sees Ford moving into treating experience as a channel that can amplify their brand in ways traditional advertising never could.
When it came to the movie trailer itself I brought in production company Carnage, and with their exec producer, former Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon, we co-wrote the script. We quickly realised the challenges associated with making just a trailer, which are usually created from a cut-down feature film.
When it came to the live experience I worked alongside megastar Tim Stafford, live producer at Imagination, combining digital and live to create an experience that continues to sell out around Europe, truly turning those who come into Ford fans.
Go Faster came from Imagination's trademark first class experience delivery team. Creating everything from plan drawings and physicals to the technology backbone that underpins capturing your footage, feeding it to the on-site editors, never losing track of your perfect take.
Those who attend receive their movie poster and trailer the same day.
Awards:
Campaign Event Awards: Winner - Digital Experience
Innovative Activation / Event of the year - The Drum
Role: Creative Head
Live producer: Tim Stafford
Experience Stunt team: Paul Swift Stunts
Film Credits:
Agency Producer: Greg Hobden
Director: Konrad Begg
DoP: Jan Richter-Friis
Production company: Carnage
Exec Producer: Oisin Tymon
Exec Producer: Ben Hampshire
Producer: Neil Edson
Editor: Ryan Clarke
Stunt driver: Paul Swift
Cast:
Remy: James Oliver Wheatley
Carston: Henry Davis
Scarlett: Claire Dante
Sparky: Fayez Bakhsh
To mark the 50th anniversary of the iconic movie BULLITT staring Steve McQueen, Ford released a special edition Fastback Mustang in highland green, de-badged with more than a few extra horses under the hood of this unique pony.
To accompany the launch at the Detroit auto show, I designed a set of studios where you could play the part of Molly McQueen, Steve’s grand daughter who plays the lead role in the launch film. Take home your movie trailer and movie poster, share on social and unleash your inner McQueen in this immersive experience.
These studios were designed to tour, and have moved from Detroit to Toronto, New York, Geneva and Ford’s own World Headquarters where slots to play the part sold out in 20 minutes.
A scaled down version of the studios have also visited Goodwood Festival of Speed and the Geneva Motor show.
I was also lucky enough to help launch the car in Europe. A partnership with GQ magazine saw Maddie and Chase McQueen in a chase through the French Alps. Avoiding paparazzi along the way to Geneva where the car was unveiled at the 2018 Geneva show - culminating in a true global launch.
Studios Awards:
Ex Awards Gold - Best use of technology and social media
Event Tech Awards - Best use of Social Media - Silver
Role: Creative Director
US studios team:
Tech lead: Michael Klann
Dev: Kel Phillipson & Jay Stockhausen
Editor: Nick Sullivan
3D: Ron Pawlicki & Jason McCombs
Graphics: Joe Gabry
Production technology: Peter Brooks, James Castro, Danny Drop
Account leads: Mandy Mitroff & Chrissie Smith
Production: Scott Heins
Lighting: Doug Green & Mikey Smalls
Live production: Laurie Jamieson
Europe film production:
Director / DP / Editor: Simon Baker
Producer: Greg Hobden
Service Company: Jake Productions- Nice, France.
Post: Roundtable Films
One day I stepped into a creative team's office to find three scamps on a wall. "They're pretty nice I said". "Yeah", they said. "They've been up there for a while. No idea how to make them." "Can I have a bash?" I said.
Around 18 months later, (majoritively all in my own time) a lot of blood, sweat, tears, craft, dodgy laser printers, sellotape and drooling over 50's memorabilia. These three were finally finished.
It was wonderful working with Bill Hartley and Giles Hepworth. The purity in their ideas were what immediately drew me in and made me want to give up my evenings and weekends to realise them.
Role: Design, Illustration & CGI
Additional credits:
Bill Hartley & Giles Hepworth - Creative Team
Dave Masterman - Creative Director
The coming together of two mega giants in Nestlé and Google presented a rare chance to do some very creative work.
Working in a small team, I was the only designer / CG / motion graphics / editor working on output including master global packaging design for both 4 finger and chunky wrappers, comms concept designs, 4.4 website, video and development of the release icon, which was completed by Buck.
The first major work accompanying the release icon and packaging was a parody site entitled 'Kit Kat 4.4' and satirical video parodying the confectionery perfectionery that is the 4 finger KITKAT bar. For this, I did all editing, post production, 3D animation and motion graphics. The live action pieces were shot by Neil Raja @ New Road Collective.
In the first week the video had gained over 2 million views, and the site had over 1 million unique visitors. Impressive for virtually no media spend.
Visit the 4.4 site - Yes of course the Konami code works.
Check the 4.4 video on Youtube
Awards:
Cannes Lions Silver: PR
Cannes Lions Bronze: Mobile
FAB Winner - Advertising effectiveness & Brand of the year 2014
FWA site of the day 26th Oct 2013
Awwwards site of the day Oct 4th 2013
Kinsale sharks - Digital silver
Kinsale sharks - Media bronze
Some of the vast press coverage:
IPA | Mashable | BBC | Sky News | Engadget | Creative Review
The 2nd phase of work was formed by the introduction of the Kit Kat Break Labs. The home of all Kit Kat technology and innovation. A site and video was produced for this, mostly using the same team. I produced all design for the site, and did all editing, CGI, post production, grading and sound mix for the Break Labs Video.
Check the Break Labs video on YouTube
Credits
Barry Christie Creative Director
Ant Hill Account Director
Joe Fox Copy
Matt Payne, Head of tech
Tobias Fieldhouse, Desktop front-end
Henry Moyo, Mobile
Project managers, Ian Hughes, Steve Mead & Joe Bassary who PM'd the 4.4 site build and videos.
Sonali Fenner, Sal Brown & Charlotte Edwards who kept the client happy along the rollercoaster site build.
TA Live. Broadcasting live during commercial breaks on ITV from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan to highlight the British Territorial Army's role working alongside regular soldiers.
My role on this project was defining the campaign visual identity. I created 3 x 10" teaser ads that ran in the period up to and in between the live 60" ads which I also created the bumpers for.
I did the 3D, motion graphics editing and sound design for all "non-live" material that went out.
The 'data glitch' look was rolled out not only on TV, but on the Youtube channel I helped design alongside Jamie Green, but the print and OOH materials.
Client: Capita / MoD
Agency: JWT
My role: Titles direction, Editing, Motion Graphics, Typography & Sound design.
Creatives: Anita Davis & Jon Budds
Creative Director: Adam Scholes
Producer: Toby Clifton
The campaign was shortlisted for best use of Media at Cannes 2013. It also won Campaign of the year at the CIPD recruitment marketing awards.
Some press coverage:
To support the launch of the all-new Ford Focus these films were created and were played out at the launch event in London, 2018.
Featuring real, found Ford Focus customers, the insight here is that current Focus customer’s passions have informed the design of the new car.
These are some truly amazing individuals and it was my pleasure to meet them and see into their lives.
Role: Creative Director
Creative: Lucy Glenn
Director: Charlie Targett-Adams
DP: Daniel Lobo-Pires
CA: Marcus Albertsen
Producer: Cleo Hodgkinson
The Explorer Platinum Adventure Tour was a media drive that ran from Vancouver BC following the rockies to Calgary, crossing the border in Montana continuing south down through Idaho, Wyoming and Yellowstone, Utah, Colorado finishing up in New Mexico.
2700 miles, 9 Cities, 25 days and 6 waves of media later we had captured an epic adventure on film.
Alongside the film shown here and shot social ‘updates from the road’ edits, the lead Explorer that I drove for a lot of the trip ended up at the 2016 Detroit Auto Show where we transformed it into a ride.
Passengers jumped in and were lifted 20ft into the air in front of a huge curved section of high-res LED and got to re-live our adventure down the Rockies.
Everyone we met along the tour signed the car, and the icing on the cake was when President Obama visited the Ford stand and signed the hood.
Film
Role: Director
DOP: Jeff Dougherty
Camera Assistants and Drone Pilots: Nick Sullivan & Joel Knoop
Producers: Jason Pannecouk & Cole Sigmon
VO: William J Violenus
Key Clients @ Ford William Mattiace & Mark Schirmer
Account Director: Ken Regalado
Autoshow ride additional:
Producer: Ben Dresser
Technical: James Castro & Danny Drop
Lighting: Dougie Green
Animators: John Drobil & Collin Macrae Leix
Client Services: Andrew Horberry
And many other wonder people in the Imagination Detroit Office
The work I've created for HSBC spans conceptual, responsive and mobile design and motion graphics.
When HSBC came to JWT with a brief for a custom youtube channel, I presented 6 concepts back. 3 which were great interface solutions to showcase their existing content and 3 which represented where I though they should go in terms of interface, interaction and content development.
The client loved all 3 and requested we find a way to get them all into a single custom channel. This was the beginning of an ever expanding relationship with HSBC for digital work.
Fast forward to today and HSBC have a brand new custom channel shown here, built with YouTube's responsive one channel architecture in mind. Flexible from 1060px down to 640px for tablet and desktop and a custom mobile design as well, everything is in the detail with this platform agnostic build. From custom design rollover states, a custom font created purely for icon used on high pixel density displays and playlist containers designed and built from the ground up.
This concept which underlies this channel is one of global and local relevance. The channel detects where in the world you are visiting from and displays content like video, promos, photography and tweets relevant to that region of the world. All this delivered by an intelligent, custom built admin area.
Using my motion skills I was able to create a demo video early on of the new channel which empowered our HSBC clients to sell in the innovation internally. Something which has grown into something really stand-out in the financial marketing sector.
Part of this build carries over interactive video functionality from the first incarnation. A function that gives a deeper understanding of the thinking behind the content. In the current case, a layer that sits over and enhances a TV ad. HSBC can display their credentials as an intelligent, digitally savvy bank to match their customers. I wrote and storyboarded the animation seen in each of the interaction points.
Credits:
Digital Producer - Maria Sanchez
Build - Michael Coelho (front end) & Nick Miles (back end)
Design support - Andy Minchin
Client services - Rory Yates, Eliza Sloss, Gemma Swinglehurst.
Corporate website design for Kallo Foods. A UK based parent company of organic based brands including Whole Earth, So good, Rice Dream and Kallo themselves. With this one I enjoyed crafting an unusually warm and friendly corporate site. Injecting the right amount of personality and organic credentials whilst always remembering this is a parent company who want to let their brands do the talking was key here.
with no brand guidelines, and simply a logo I had to generate a complete look and feel including typography, colour palette and photography.
Client: Kallo Foods
My role: Design, Art Direction and 3D.
Design Director – Simon Coupe.
Producer – Kären Kenobi.
At Imagination i've had the pleasure of meeting many of the amazing and remarkable people who work at Ford. And make films about them.
I've got to work with many people, production companies, producers etc.. along the way. Please check in the Vimeo descriptions for credits. I've been the Creative Director on all of those shown here.
Getting under the skin of people, finding out about them and telling their stories has been a wonderful expansion of what my job entails.
A Go Further event represents the biggest launch event type Ford of Europe run. It’s not regular and only happens when they’ve got something really big to shout about.
I lead content for the show. Overseeing everything that went on 240 metres of LED that flanked a multi-stage arena that held 2500 people.
Go Further is a platform for news beyond a single car launch so included Ford’s future vision for mobility, employee stories, motorsport, commercial vehicles and a lot more.
The largest piece of news was the launch a 40 year old icon of motoring the all-new Ford Fiesta.
For the car launch films Croatia was selected as it offered a variety of locations to help tell the stories of the four flavours the new model come in. These films have run in every European market and B-roll was provided to media to create their own stories.
Role: Content creative director
Show credits:
Live producer: Tim Stafford
3D lead: Mark Spiller
Account lead: Sophie Darling
Animation Art director: Mustafa Miah
Fiesta films:
Production Company: Progress Film Company
Director / Editor: Matt Hopkins
DP: Matt Shaw
Progress Producer: Lucinda Jones
Imagination Producer: Dan Coulson
In 2007 when I joined CHI&Partners, one of the first projects I got to work on was a website for No More Landmines. Working under creative directors Thiago De Moraes and Micky Tudor, they had already established the idea that of course landmines mean the ground is dangerous place to be in certain parts of the world and how can we best dramatise this.
Lewis, a free runner from Urban Freeflow, who also provided free runners for the famous BBC and channel 4 idents at the time travelled around the south bank without touching the ground the convey that idea.
I was the photographer on the shoot. Keeping up with Lewis was tough, but a lot of fun. 2200 photos later and we had enough to populate our 'flipbook' style homepage and video.
The campaign was awarded gold at The One Show, was nominated for best use of photography at The Webby Awards, and was best in book in the Creative Review Annual of that year.
I helped code the site, but lead developer was Dan Fontana.
Thiago and myself were designers.
Whilst at Skive in 2011 I had the opportunity to work on a web game where players can 'serve' at Rafa Nadal to try and ace him for a chance to win a trip to meet him in person.
Skive was commissioned by 23Red to create the game, part of a wider campaign for the client Bacardi called Champions drink responsibly, of which Rafa is their ambassador.
The game combines real footage of rafa with the 'Roboserv' serving robot. We flew out to Mallorca to shoot Rafa at his private tennis court - a very enjoyable shoot!
The game was a large contributor to the success of the campaign which did very well with 20,477 users entering the competition.
I was the interactive art director at the shoot, game interface designer and I created the animated intro sequence.
The developer was Steven Archer @ Skve.
Once every four years the British and Irish lions comes together to tour a foreign land. In 2013 that was to be Australia. HSBC were the principal partner sponsor for the tournament and as such it fell to JWT to create a campaign to reflect that legendary journey.
Working alongside an incredible creative team in Daniel Hennessey and Iain Wetherby, their idea of an epic film in a master and commander style where we follow the crew on the high seas to Australia, celebrating the 125th anniversary of the original British and Irish lions journey was to be a great grounding for the digital work to follow.
Working with digital creative director Christopher Jones, it fell to myself to flesh out and finally execute 2 key pieces of work for the campaign. The interface for a custom YouTube channel and an interactive video where you can explore further some of the characters in the film.
An 18 camera DSLR rig was used to create a Timeslice of each of our characters in a studio adjacent to the main set for the film shoot. This type of integration in production was critical to the success of the campaign. It meant talent came straight off set and into our studio. Makeup, costume and expression were the same meaning a seamless experience could be achieved.
The styling for the YouTube channel interface was designed to be complimentary to the campaign while still being an experience in its own right.
I also created a masthead that ran for 24 hours on the YouTube homepage. This was a full CGI build done in Cinema 4D, graded and composited in After Effects.
Awards:
BT Sport Industry Awards 2014 - Best Integrated Marketing Campaign
Marketing Society Awards for Excellence - Best entry from outside the UK.
Additional credits:
Digital Producer: Maria Sanchez
Build: Mickael Coelho
Masthead Creatives:
Simon Sworn & Matt Chandler
Celebrity drivers, hollywood stars, former SAS, and the most inhospitable roads and terrain in the world. Driven to Extremes was a 3 episode series produced for discovery to test and highlight the capability of Shell Helix motor oil in the harshest of conditions.
My role was lead design for the custom YouTube channel that supported the series. Cut down clips were uploaded onto the channel along with unseen footage from the show.
3 Interface options (bottom) were developed. One focusing on the types of terrains the teams would traverse, one which moved through each terrain as a journey, and one cleaner photographic led route.
Given the amount of content to be uploaded, a clean design balancing both Shell and Discovery branding was the order of the day. A photographic led horizontal parallaxing interface was developed.
Client: Shell
Agency: JWT
My role: Lead design
Creative Director: Chris Jones
Producer: Ben Young
Production Agency: Cohesus
A mix of stuff, all done in my own time.