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Years ago I worked as an art director for a large Manhattan advertising agency. I worked on a creative team that consisted of several art directors and copywriters, a group head, a creative director and an account executive (and associated support staff). There were many of these groups at the agency. Each group had their own accounts that they were responsible for.
Generally, the account executive would interface with the client and bring the creative team a project like this. The group would break up into smaller teams of individual art directors and copywriters to brainstorm and come up with a concept. Then the concept was storyboarded (if it was video), or a rough layout (if it was for print). The storyboard was a shot by shot rough rendering of the concept to be presented to the group head, creative director and account executive. Any concept that passed muster would get presented to the client for approval to procede. We had a staff of storyboard and layout artists that was responsible for doing finished storyboards for client presentations (more polished than my rough sketches). Once the idea was approved, we sourced independent contractors to do the actual work--illustrators, videographers, film directors, photographers, animation studios, etc. Considering the variety of work that we were doing for all the different clients, it didn't make sense to maintain staff to do the finished work. It was always outsourced. All the better studios have reels or samples that their representatives send to the agency periodically to recruit work. We would look at these samples to decide on several capable studios/contractors and put the job out to bid. Once the team decided on a contractor, we interfaced with them to get the project completed. Many hours are spent on a set or in a studio with the creative team and the contractor making sure the end result met the creative team's vision and the client's needs. Additionally, if we shot film, post production studios generally not associated with the film studios were used for the editing. They converted the film to video and digitally edited it. [Today, I'd think most directors are shooting direct digital though.]
A job for a large client like Sears was likely done this way. Designed by their agency and completed by an independent animation studio. However, in today's digital age, a small boutique ad agency could have pulled this off in-house without outsourcing anything but possibly some of the illustration. Back when I started in advertising, we didn't have computer workstations on every desk. It would have taken lots of computing power from a mainframe to pull this off. Only the large animation studios had that ability. I used to fly out to the mid-west or the west coast for weeks at a time to do animations like this that I could pull off today without leaving my desk in half the time.
posted by 64.128.17...
, Fri, 8 Jul 2011 08:06:38, Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:47:36
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