Outlaw - Network Launch
From legendary tales of the Old West to contemporary classics, Outlaw is the new destination for Western fans. The network is one of the all-new FAST (free, advertising supported television) offerings from FreeTV.
Like with The365 Network, FreeTV came to us to create a full network package from the boots up. This included establishing a look that works for every era of the genre, delivering dozens of assets, and crafting the most intricate toolkit we’ve ever made.
Get ready to grit your teeth, take ten paces, and draw… (with a stylus and tablet, naturally).
This town ain’t big enough for the two of us… (actually, it is)
FreeTV gave us a great starting point, with the logo, color palette, fonts, and initial mood boards already being created by their brilliant Art Director, Kelly Turner. The team provided us with a lot of freedom to roam, allowing us to explore as we crafted the overall final look.
We were creating the Outlaw network package at the exact same time as The365, and both projects presented the same two major creative challenges.
One: Outlaw and The365 have very distinct looks, with Outlaw relying more on footage and The365 relying more on graphics. There wasn’t any overlap stylistically.
Two: Each network’s toolkit needed to have functional parity, so we needed to create it in a way that would work for the teams at both networks — who each had drastically different approaches. As we’ll show later on in the case study, this challenge forced us to think deeply to create the best toolkit possible.
Shades of the frontier
FreeTV created a color palette that draws from the landscape of the frontier with its big skies and red-orange, earthy hues.
We used these shades to figure out how to make the diverse source material that spans decades to look cohesive. We treated the footage with tritones of brand colors, which helped tie together everything from SD to 4K, black and white to full color.
Landscape mode
The star of our show is a character that’s featured in every single Western: the Wild West itself!
Every single part of the design incorporates a natural element from the frontier, from the topography to dust and fire.
The final backdrops actually include footage of Sonoma shot from a hot air balloon by our Junior Designer, Katie Roberts!
Quick draw
Putting this all into motion, we drew from the verbs of the Western.
The main action was driven by snappy bursts, inspired by gunslingers, whips, and lassos. This would linger to settle into the organic elements.
Each shot portrays an idyllic landscape that’s ready to erupt into action at any time.
Toolkitted Out
As we explain in our The365 case study, we needed to create a toolkit with functionality that would work for both the team at Outlaw as well as the team at The365, despite their very different approaches. To solve this problem, we created our most thought-through toolkit to date.
Everything was designed to maximize flexibility, featuring position expressions that react to different lengths of text and quick dropdown menus to make it easy to change colors and tune-in days and times.
Our thanks to the team at FreeTV for the opportunity to help launch this wild network.
Credits
Client: FreeTV
Creative Director: Bryan Slonaker
Art Director: Kelly Turner
Motion Designer: Roberto Zavala
Production Company: Elevation
Executive Creative Director: Stephen Cocks
Art Director: Dianne Frisbee
Creative Director: David Hendrix
Senior Designer, Animator: Sean Kiley
Senior Producer: Alina Klopach
Junior Designer: Katie Roberts