Art Direction & Styling for ordnance Survey Christmas Wonderland
Recently I had an amazing opportunity to work with the folks over at Anything is Possible (thanks Quianna for the intros!)
I worked alongside the super talented Andy McLane: Creative Director & Hollie Forsyth: Head of production!
We scoped out ideas in some real-time brainstorming sessions where we could be creative, just spitballing until an angles and ideas developed. Andy's mind is amazing and I learned so much from this way of working. It had been a long time since I didn't have to work off a written brief, and whilst I felt nervous I tried my best not to be too precious about things and ideas flowed.
Andy’s quick initial scamp
Andy had a strong concept about a paper world, which tied into the Ordnance Survey Maps. I was quite familiar with this medium having worked with the incredibly talented Owen Gildersleeves on the Lush Self Preserving project and was happy to run with it, digging out ways we could achieve the look. We could have done it digitally but we felt going with handmade techniques would be a more authentic to the look and feel as well as more aligned with Ordnance Survey
We scoped out papers artists and Holly landed on the crazy talented Nicola Dobrowolski, her work was incredible and her experience and approach made the whole process seamless.
The initial design, whilst cute and illustrative were flat and built up of layers. Knowing how much we could play with light and how we would need scaling flexibility for a big range of products I was keen to create 3D structures, folded triangles of sorts that would replicate mountains but also catch the light from different angles to create depth, I was also conscious of scaleability (with a background in window retail design) to make sure all products, both big and small looked strong when merchandised in the scene.
Nicola building the mountain set on the day.
Nicola aced it, not only that she brought her INSANE skills for character building that would sit in the sets. She worked with beautiful colour gradients that were taken from OS branding and that mimicked real landscapes.
I asked that our set be moveable, so Nicola created two sets at different scales to support product merchandising. Holly got the shot lists together and did an amazing job of steering the day making sure we had captured everything we needed! (+ all the pre-production I won’t know about!)
Nicolas Character designs
Nicolas also made additional characters on set with brilliant speed and precision.
Dog in a shallow lake
Nicola and I worked together to manage the styling. Whilst we predominantly each stuck to product and paper styling we still worked together to build the scenes, rearranging elements around products and playing with the scale of big and small trees to create real depth.
Nat & Nicola building set at Pro Hire Studio
The delightful James Williams shot all of this in his in-house studio; Pro Studio Hire, a.k.a The Picture House - I am sure he'll go into depth about the lighting he used to bring the scene to life but we played with varied coloured hues and he added a light behind the scene to create more depth. It was a challenging job to create consistency through such a big set but looked amazing on the final output.
Overview of set
Our visuals have now gone line across Ordnance Survey websites! Take a look and even stock up on Chrimmy gifts for those who love the outdoors. Hope you enjoyed this BTS of how it came to life. We had an absolute blast!
