JWTwo: From Facility to Funhouse
Dozens of big ad agencies have in-house production facilities. In large part, the reasons are purely economic. When time-pressured creative teams need to move beyond scribbles, scripts, and storyboards, it’s far more efficient to keep that work in the same building rather than in the offices of costly outside vendors. At the same time, in-house facilities are charged with wringing maximum profit from the expensive editing and effects gear they use — usually proprietary systems that require experienced operators just to turn them on.
Often, the result is a clash of cultures — “creatives” versus “technicians,” “artists” versus “craftsmen,” “brains” versus “hands.” And working relationships that, while not necessarily adversarial, are not completely collegial, either.
These days, in the New York offices of the storied and award-winning agency JWT, that unfortunate paradigm has bitten the dust. “By investing in an Apple Xsan system, we’ve torn down those walls,” says Drew Vogelman, managing director of JWTwo, the agency’s integrated production house. In the process, they’ve created new and nimble methods for all their people to work together in a way that’s fueled by mutual inspiration, instead of interdepartmental suspicions.
The Xsan Factor
“Xsan was primarily a business decision, a way to solve some knotty workflow issues,” says Vogelman. “But what it’s done for us — and for the entire agency — is far beyond our expectations. In one stroke, it distributes more multimedia capabilities — shared more easily, among more talented people — than we’ve ever had before. And that’s radically changed the perception of JWTwo within the agency from a technical facility to a true creative partner. A trusted resource that can make a difference in wowing clients with strong, original work — created almost overnight.”
With their voluminous Xsan network, JWTwo and JWT talents share terabytes of imagery, animations, video footage, Logic Pro, and Final Cut Studio projects-in-progress, and more — making the journey from inspiration to execution “a much more organic and fluid process,” says Vogelman.
“You can rave about the strengths and specs of Xsan, but the best way to explain its power is to call it a playground — a bigger, better, faster, more inspiring place to play, for a bunch of talented folks who, when the vibe’s right, just love to collaborate. They thrive in this environment.”
Jumping Hoops for JetBlue
Nothing better exemplifies that breath of fresh air than the agency’s recent animated campaign for JetBlue, an airline that’s founded its reputation on friendly customer service. “Everyone who travels on JetBlue loves it, so it was natural to base the spots on testimonials from real people,” says Vogelman. “But nobody wants to see 30 seconds of talking heads in their commercials. We needed to come up with something fresh, funny, and noticeably different.”
To complicate matters, the agency was pitching the business, and the client presentation was insanely imminent. The decision was made to shoot the testimonials against a green screen, then trust that their Xsan-based collaborative environment would enable them to animate something spectacular on the fly.
Says JWTwo animator Ian Lamont-Havers, “The creative direction was simple: ‘Don’t think about advertising. Just start animating from your heart and create stuff you think is good.’ So that’s what we did — and it was really liberating for us. We went to town and had a great time. Guys pulled out their sketchbooks and their paints and went nuts.”
Rawness Is a Virtue
The resulting JetBlue ads amply convey the enthusiasm of satisfied JetBlue customers. Yet they also preserve the raw, antic, it’s-not-necessarily-for-the-client-yet fervor of those original sketches, revealing — and reveling in — the interplay between illustrators, animators, sound and video editors, writers, and art directors, all having a good time under an impossibly tight deadline.
“What makes the spots so fresh is that they blend all sorts of elements — watercolor textures, pen-and-ink sketches, cartoon squiggles on cocktail napkins — that we’d normally never imagine using in a slick advertising setting,” says Lamont-Havers. All were quickly scanned, composited, and animated — with Xsan enabling fat multimedia files to be shared among very busy collaborators on both sides of the production-creative fence.
“The last spot we finished for the pitch was done in about 18 hours, start to finish,” says animator Lamont-Havers. “And I remember thinking, we’ve done this so fast, I’d love to go back and fix some of the animation that seemed a little crude. But everyone said, ‘No, don’t touch it, it’s perfect, we love it.’”
