Leveraging a Personal Project

"Kudos doesn't quite sum it up. I just had a chance to view the cut of your film that we're using in our digital issue. Simply stunning. Your work is amazing and I'm so excited to be featuring this in our app."

—Christopher Johnson, Art Director, The Nature Conservancy

Client: The Nature Conservancy & Rizzoli Publications

Goal
Both The Nature Conservancy and Rizzoli are traditional print publishers (TNC puts out its own magazine; Rizzoli is an Italian firm specializing in art books). Both also know they need to embrace multimedia in ways that support their high level of editorial quality. And both were working in 2012 with the painter James Prosek: Rizzoli to publish a book of his recent work documenting ocean fishes of the North Atlantic, and TNC profiling him in their magazine. They wanted to engage and excite readers through their websites.

Creative solution
Since 2010 we had been working outside TOC on a short documentary film about James and his ocean fishes project, called Picture the Leviathan. We realized how much our film work cross-pollinates with the work of TOC, and how much potential there is to undertake film projects with multiple outlets in mind.

TNC and Rizzoli asked us to use the material we had in hand to produce, respectively, a five-minute cut of the film for use in The Nature Conservancy’s electronic version of their magazine, and a book trailer for the Rizzoli sales force and web site (above). We were also asked to photograph James and his studio in ways that will be optimized for their tablet edition (for example, a 360-degree image of James’s studio that readers may navigate).

We have now folded our documentary film work into Take One Creative's portfolio. Our work as documentarians colors our approach to all our projects, and documentary work lends itself to multiple formats and outlets, which can mean reaching otherwise inaccessible audiences for a client.