Brown Blog Films

We got the fantastic news that Olivia was being played on the MTV screen in Times Square. It’s quite a thrill to see your work in such an iconic place.

Kidscreen were going to run Olivia on their cover in February which coincided with the Kidscreen Summit which takes place in the Hilton not too far from Times Square, so this gave Megan the idea of ‘why don’t we put Olivia in New York hailing a cab?’

This sounded cool so we lashed out a couple of images just as a starting point.

Sarah in CSL knocked up this sketch as a suggestion making Olivia much bigger and making her the hero of the shot rather than the city.  We all agreed ‘Yeah, that’s it!’

We had to turn this around pretty quick & didn’t have time to model a New York Taxi so we grabbed the cop car from the show, retextured it & presto, we had a New York yellow cab.

We threw together a background stitched together from some personal New York shots I had taken from a previous New York visit. Jean Herlihy posed Olivia quickly just to make sure we got the proportion right & Amber Carroll lit the shot for Stephen Robinson to comp together.

Looking cute but not quite good enough. Amory from CSL suggested let’s put Olivia in Times Square? It’s around the corner from the summit, Olivia was already playing on the screens there & it’s pretty instantly recognisable as part of New York! Luckily I had a few snaps in my collection that we were able to raid & make it happen!

So here was the first rough version. We recomposed the shot & moved Olivia down in order to allow a little more room for the background to read. Check out my mug on the screen! Stepehens idea of a joke but Megan spotted it straight away!

Then we set about removing all advertising from the screens & replacing them with shots of Olivia, Chorion branding & there’s even a nod to the Brown Bag logo in there. We also tried to put more contrast between the sky & the buildings to pop a bit & make it look like Olivia wasn’t out by herself too late in the evening!… not that she would be hailing a cab by herself anyway… I’m sure Mom & Dad are just out of shot keeping an eye on her

As a final touch, Stephen pulled some footstep snow reference from an Olivia episode & painted in Olivia’s footsteps & some snow & did some final touching up!

And Voila… here’s the final shot as it went to print. We’re pretty happy with the final result & hope you like it too!