This ad, designed to recruit team drivers for a major national trucking company, was created to illustrate the concept of 'working together as a team'. The initial photograph, obtained as a stock image from Corbis, showed one hunter with his dog in a horizontal format. While it had the right look and feel, company executives thought that the man and dog 'team' implied that one was the boss and one was, well, the dog.
At the last minute, Mad Dog Marketing's head honcho Mary Fawcett suggested inserting a second hunter in the scene to create a more equitable team. Working with little time, we had the choice of creating a new person by cloning elements of the existing hunter in the shot already, or shooting an entirely new 'hunter'. The proximity of the two would make cloning too obvious, so the studio was quickly set up to mimic the lighting of the original shot and Erich took off his glasses, threw on a hat and an old camouflage coat and became the second hunter. The shot was captured digitally, and the resulting file outlined and fine tuned to show him cradling a shotgun (lifted from the first hunter) and rotated into position. Color and tonality were matched and our second hunter took his place with the first.
Now it was necessary to create a larger sky area for the copy to go over, so a hazy overcast was stretched into the virtual firmament and blended into the original. The flock of ducks was, of course, the final problem. To create the flock flying in the shape of the company logo, a set of custom brushes were configured in Photoshop, each in the shape of a bird in flight in slightly different wing positions. These brushes were then used to lay in the flock, varying opacity and size to create the illustion of distance and depth.
The final image was delivered in two aspect ratios for two different publications, and with the ducks on a separate layer for easy repositioning to accomodate type in the final ads.
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