Nice Shoes teamed once again with the Ad Council to prepare reels for the organization’s 60th Annual Public Service Award Dinner, an event that honors the industries and individuals who support the Ad Council and its public service advertising (PSA) campaigns. This year’s dinner paid tribute to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, and was hosted by Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers. For each gala, the organization crafts reels to showcase all the effectiveness of campaigns in the categories of Family & Community, Health & Safety, as well as Education. Nice Shoes put together a small and efficient team of designer Chadwick Whitehead and editor Tony Dolezal to execute the reels, with producer Jason Farber managing the pair.
Dolezal, who worked on last year’s gala, brought an understanding of how the team could showcase the different medium of work equally, and in a compelling way. Whitehead expanded on the concept from last year’s reels to make 2013’s include branching transitions between illustrated elements that signified each category. “With each association that came to me for each category, I made sure to arrange them in a way that would lend themselves to being visually interesting as well as thematically appropriate,” said Whitehead. Both artists worked in Adobe’s creative suite, which in addition to Nice Shoes’ technical infrastructure, made for a much more efficient collaborative process.
Working with a list of media from the clients, Tony decided what elements were being used for each campaign, and put together rough animations on how and when each element would be displayed. He orchestrated where the broadcast spot would cut into the print advertising and when the radio spot would cut in. In addition to the icon-specific intros and outros, Whitehead designed typographic transitions between each campaign.
Whitehead credited producer Jason Farber as an inspiration. “In addition to managing our time and resources, and communicating with our client, Jason was instrumental in encouraging us to push this concept as far as we could creatively.” Added Farber, “It was fulfilling for all of us to not only craft work that shows all the design and editorial capabilities of Nice Shoes, but to help the Ad Council present all their amazing campaigns that have a positive, real world impact.”
To view the reels, please visit the Annual Dinner microsite here.
About Nice Shoes:
NYC-based Nice Shoes is a full service, artist-driven design, animation, visual effects and color grading studio specializing in high-end commercials, web content, film, TV and music videos. Since its inception in 1996, the studio has prided itself on consistently reinvesting in its talent, technical backbone, and client experience to set the standard of excellence both creatively and technically. Key company principals include: CEO/Partner Dominic Pandolfino, Colorists/Partners Chris Ryan and Lez Rudge, and CIO Robert Keske.