It's really special to be apart of a company that doesn't forget about the bigger picture, the bigger world out there. ExtremeTerrain did a complete Jeep overhaul for a wounded police officer, Officer Dorman, who is a local hero in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Officer Dorman was injured on the job not very long ago, taking several bullets and is currently healing towards a full recovery. The Southern Delaware Jeep Club contacted ExtremeTerrain to do a few mods and it turned into a large project within a quick turnaround.
While most of this project was handled by our XT installation specialists, video and marketing departments, of course the creative team had their share in helping this project see the light. Various departments came together quickly to work with the e-commerce team to get a landing page together. I was fortunate enough to complete the design of the landing page pulling design and UI elements from various places for it all to come together in an efficient matter. Once all of the photos, videos, copy blocks and events were completed it turned into something like this: ExtremeTerrain.com/police-officer-chris-dorman-jeep-reveal.html (also shown below). Be sure to watch the video on there, huge props to our video team as well.
Overall my task with this landing page were minimal and I more so managed how to get all of the pieces together. The sketches were previously drawn by in-house designer, Peter Owen. He took on the work to composite the Jeep images in the background for the slider at the top. The various photos I selected required minimum retouching that I took on, and the reveal photo took some retouching and compositing to get what we were looking for with that final image. With the copy and content being provided it was my responsibility to make visual changes as revisions came in and get those mock ups out quickly so everyone involved in the project could see the changes and approve and/or provide feedback. My part seems small in the spectrum of all that went into making this build possible, however, I am quite grateful to have been a part of this very positive and inspiring story.
I have been doing a poor job documenting the progress I have been making with the Honda CB360 motorcycle build. There was a lull in the action as I ordered more parts and anxiously awaited their arrival. About two weeks ago we got the rear wheel in place, and man is the CB shiny and cute or what!
I was really happy with the progress and it was starting to transform from a simple pile of metal to something that resembles part of a motorcycle!
Tuesday evening we made even more progress with a rebuild of the front forks, using none other than Spectro Fork Oil. We got the forks on, front wheel and put on some temporary handlebars for the time being while I awaited the delivery of new ones.
I even had some help from the Throttle Down Speed Co. sponsored GNC1 Flat Track racer, Dan Bromley as you can see above! And while I failed to get a nice profile shot of the progress we made, I'll just have to leave you with the one below until next time. Next up are handlebars, mirrors, air filters, covers and a trip to the powdercoater. Next on the order list is a front caliper and a custom seat.
The ExtremeTerrain catalogs have also hit mailboxes this week, and while much of the book was not updated for this drop, we did design and include new content in the insert. Tailored for the Trail is an article based on the Jeep build XT did on a 2-door 2013 JK Wrangler. You can view the full project here: ExtremeTerrain.com/TrailReady. Below is the single page design I had created by placing the copy and imagery. All photography and copy was provided by our in-house teams.
Another round of catalogs were produced by the graphics department again and hit mailboxes beginning yesterday. The 2015-2016 Mustang catalog got a refresh & I worked on the inside front cover/table of contents and the exterior section. In addition to that three AM books got fresh content which I again was responsible for designing the Customer Spotlight articles. Below are the three for this catalog drop. In-house copy was provided along with in-house product photography and lifestyle photography from each customer. I designed the layout and retouched the photos.
Above is the 2010-2014 Customer Spotlight that features one large lifestyle, three additional smaller ones and four products. Below is the 2005-2009 Customer Spotlight that is also similar in layout.
The 2015-2016 is my favorite for this round because I was very inspired by the graffiti in the lifestyle photograph provided by the customer. I took that inspiration, made a doodle with a black gel pen, vectorized the drawing in Adobe Illustrator and added color digitally. From there I tossed it into Photoshop to add some layers of splattered color with the overlay blend mode to get dimension similar to what was in the graffiti. Below is the transition from paper to digital to the final printed catalog piece.
There will be one more round of AmericanMuscle catalogs to hit the press yet this year, stay tuned!
I've mentioned it before, well it's officially for sale! Get yours: https://www.throttledownspeedco.com/products/tracker-sticker
ExtremeTerrain is currently running a monthly sale for July, and I was responsible for the creative. I initially found this JK Wrangler image from our in house photographs and did a little retouching. I added some elements to make it look like the jeep was kicking up dirt and really wheeling. This shot has a lot of background included and was cropped in closer in various ways for a variety of graphics.
I found and retouched similar images for the TJ and YJ gens, shown below, while adding some extra elements such as dirt, a lens flare and XT branding:
These images were used for homepage graphics, email a-spots and b-spots, as well as various other site and social applications. Where live text was used I livened up the copy by mixing typefaces as shown below in a forum banner:
Visit ExtremeTerrain.com during the month of July to see this creative live on their site.
This year AmericanMuscle wanted to send out an email that focused solely on creativity and the July 4th holiday. The focus would not be to sell products or push customers to the website but rather focus on the friendly message. This email lead to endless creative opportunities and animation was the focus.
All along I had the vision of simple fireworks in the back of a scene. I began by finding a base image that included a photo of the 2015 in the parking lot.
I took that base image into Keyshot and rendered out a 2015 in that exact angle, since this car is primarily stock. Being an aftermarket company, the more aftermarket mods shown, the better. In addition to the 2015 render, I also exported a 2014 render to make this a multi generational shot.
From there the compositing began. I needed to rework the trees so there would be more visible sky behind the two cars in my new composition. I made a selection of the original trees and made a black paint layer of those, while also adding some additional stock trees to get the shape I was looking for. I took the 2015 render and painted in parts of the car to show off the additional aftermarket mods. I placed the 2014 Mustang behind the 2015 and did some post work on the lights to illuminate them.
There was an original request to also have a non animated version for our social channel, so I found some stock fireworks in a warm sky that reminded me a lot like the original image and would work well with the rendered reflections. I added reflections to the windshield as well.
From there it was time to take the layers into After Effects. Without ever opening the program before, I had a lot to learn. I ended up finding some stock video footage that would work well for the fireworks in the sky. I took one piece of footage and split it up to change the timing of each firework so they would overlap and occur within a short sequence. I found a new sky image that did not include any fireworks to use behind the trees and made the fireworks video clips into the Add mode to get rid of their original black background. From there I placed the necessary copy and had myself an animation! I experimented with file dimension and size to see what would work best for Facebook applications. It was critical to view it on desktop and mobile since Facebook treats the same post very differently. For email, I adjusted the layout and made the height a bit shorter to make the file size more manageable. Below was the final gif:
For the first time in After Effects, I could not have been happier with the turnout! I would like to perfect the reflections of the fireworks within the animation, but with the time crunch I believe it gets the job done.
