PROJECT TITLE: Maps
CLIENT: Tourism Ireland
AGENCY: JWT, London
CREATIVE DIRECTION: Taylor James
COMPLETE PRODUCTION: Taylor James
Production Breakdown:
- cgi80%
- post20%
JWT, London, commissioned TJ to create 10 multiple 3D maps characterizing Ireland’s landscape and key attractions and journeys across the country to form part of Tourism Ireland’s print campaign. The key to this unusual project was to create something fun and stimulating, experimenting with scale in order to get the best relationship between all of the different elements involved in making the images; including testing all of our terrain features at different sizes that would allow us to depict the different idealized Irish microcosms. After exhausting our R&D facilities we found that CGI was the only process by which we could create the maps consistently and to the best quality for print of this scale, whilst maintaining flexibility to the detail required. TJ handled the complete production for this project from concept through to final delivery. As creative leads on the project, this worked hand-in-hand with how the project should be approached technically.
BACK'Behind the scenes'
JWT London came to us with the concept of creating beautiful 3D microcosms of Ireland, depicting its wonderfully esoteric landscape and landmarks. They were looking for a treatment that would strike the right balance between photographic realism and graphic simplicity. Five were maps were needed for the first phase of the campaign, and the agency requested that they would be of such a high resolution that they could take an A4 crop of any location on the map and run it as an individual print advert.
OUR ROLE
Our first task was to invent a style that suited the concept; we needed the maps to look fun and engaging, but without looking cartoony. The crux of the solution we offered was based on the playful use of scale so we could see everything at a size that would make it clear and add to the character of the maps, but without detracting from the overall cohesion of the image. As well as making it all look great, we were charged with creating recognisable interpretations of the Irish coastline and landscape, and getting all the different landmarks in their correct positions geographically in a way that still made sense compositionally.
PRODUCTION/SOLUTION
One of the biggest challenges we faced in Production of the maps was their massive physical size. Our largest file was over 24,000 pixels wide which is pretty much unprecedented for any Print creation, but even more unusual for CGI which was originally only designed for tv-size renders of small Prints of 6,000 pixels or so. Our heritage as one of the top retouch houses in the world gave us a head start in the CGI arena as we know how to combine elements seamlessly and our top-spec specialist hardware allows us to easily manipulate massive files, even our final compressed flat tiffs were around 2GB. We worked hard to show off the iconic shape of the island, and capture it’s luscious vegetation.
Look carefully at the maps and you’ll see many different scales of object helping to tell the story… Ireland itself is shrunk down to be a little caricature of the real land; cliffs and foaming water around the edges feel almost believable for an ordinary aerial photograph of some coastline; fields too take on an aerial-photo style patchwork but with over-sized walls and fences to lend the maps greater country-charm and character; the road and the landmarks are made much larger again to really emphasise the journey itself.
RESULT
As the first five maps were a big success, running in all the best national magazines and papers for many months, as well and billboards, we were commissioned to build six more focusing on particular regions specific environments, and exploring different times of year. The maps were a great success and we had a lot of fun bringing them to life. They won many awards for creativity and execution, the most recent being the top Gold Award at the Shark Awards 2010 for Best Use Of Illustration.
