Apple’s latest ad campaign kills two birds with one stone, with short videos chronicling the process of creating posters for Apple TV+ originals “Dickinson” and “For All Mankind” using iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.
Phantom City Creative works on a poster for “For All Mankind.”
Two videos were posted to Apple’s official YouTube channel on Wednesday, each offering viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of posters made for Apple TV+ series “Dickinson” and “For All Mankind.” Both ads run about a minute and half in length.
The first short, “How I Made a Dickinson Poster on iPad Pro,” features illustrator and digital painter Janice Sung, who provides a bit of backstory before getting into the poster she drew for the show. Sung, who started out as a traditional painter at a young age, graduated to digital formats as an adult and now relies on iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to create her art.
“I’ll start by sketching on the iPad Pro, thinking of different poses that best suit Dickinson. And from there I’ll start blocking in different colors, figuring out the lighting,” Sung said. “I can go forever perfecting every painting, but the more time you spend perfecting something you’re not progressing. And growing as an artist is the most important thing for me.”
A second spot details the work of Paige and Justin of Phantom City Creative, which created two posters for the series “For All Mankind.”
“We’ll start in a sketchbook, really messy little thumbnail sketches,” Justin said. “Then we move on to our favorites in a sketch form.”
The pair takes photos of the sketches using an iPad Pro to begin the work of digitizing and finalizing the design. Line art, color roughs, color choice, composition and more other considerations are completed before work on the final art begins.
“To be period-accurate was really important to us,” Paige said. “We didn’t want to have anything that wasn’t represented in the show.”
Both videos offer unique insight into the artists’ workflow, include time-lapse style footage of each work as it moves from concept to completion.
“Dickinson” and “For All Mankind” debuted on Apple TV+ in November as launch titles and have concluded their first seasons. All 10 episodes of “Dickinson” aired on Nov. 1, the same day that the first three installments of “For All Mankind” went live.
