ROLE: DESIGN DIRECTORCOLLABORATION WITH MADE BY RADIO
HALLOWEEN SEASONAL CAMPAIGN, STYLEGUIDE & IDs
Every year, for October, Nickelodeon reskins the air and all the channel branding for Halloween. For this campaign we created a fully animated series of Halloween IDs that would serve to represent our IP but also be generic (I.e. Property agnostic) We wanted to do Halloween but with a twist, so we didn't want to do the traditional "go-to" Halloween characters for our protagonists. Instead we wanted to create a suite of “off the beaten track” Halloween characters for these little Halloween vignettes. We decided to partner with MADE BY RADIO because of their quirky sensibility and mastery in character design and animation. The first step was to create our "off center" character cast. We created a lovable and eccentric cast, Wolfbag (a cool looking Werewolf), Bat Fly (just what it sounds like), Flamey (a skull that was constantly on fire) and Bookie (a Cyclops flying book) just to name a few. My team and I collaborated with the MBR team to write short and funny narratives that would interact and relate to the Nick IP, as well as purely Halloween narratives. Once we had our story lines approved, MBR was off and running making storyboards and animatics, then my team and I turned to curating the styleguide so all the other departments would have exactly the elements they needed. All seasonal campaigns need a robust styleguide, to ensure a cohesive style for the duration of the campaign. We made sure the styleguide was complete with the Halloween campaign color palette, type treatments, icons, framing devices, patterns and background textures and sample frames that would complement the campaign. I remember having the most fun writing the stories for these ID's. They were all the more fun since we had an unusual set of cast members to work with. My favorite ID had all of our characters sitting on a couch watching a scary movie in the dark and eating popcorn, as the movie plays out the characters start wincing and wimpering, the scene continues to play out and the characters let out full screams and jump out of their seats. The camera finally turns to the TV to see what scared them so much, they are watching a really sappy kissing scene. Our vignettes stole the show with the unexpected characters paired with the intriguing (and humorous) storylines and the Halloween campaign style was disseminated through all other departments and platforms for the month of October.
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