Hanes · X-Temp · Storyboards + Animatics
Hanes X-Temp
Turning product benefits into strange little adventures built for the screen.
The Assignment
TURN IDEAS INTO PICTURES.
The campaign concepts arrived with their premise, product message, and dialogue. My role was to translate them into something everyone could actually see before production began.
For Dunes and The Arctic, that meant solving camera placement, staging, environments, transitions, comic timing, and character performance—building a visual path from written concept to finished spot.
- Client
- Hanes
- Campaign
- X-Temp Total Support Pouch
- Role
- Storyboard Artist / Illustrator / Visual Narrative Designer
- Concepts
- Dunes / The Arctic
- Deliverables
- Storyboard sequences + animatics
- Outcome
- Dunes produced and broadcast; Arctic developed as a companion concept
Visual Development
DIRECTING ON PAPER.
A storyboard has to solve the viewing experience before production begins: what the audience sees, when information is revealed, where a joke lands, and how each shot hands the story to the next one.
Dunes
AN ADVENTURE IN UNDERWEAR.
Hans crosses an enormous desert with a camel, a map, and too much heat. When he discovers an impossibly cool oasis, the product demonstration becomes the explanation for why the oasis exists at all.
The technical message is still doing its job, but it grows out of the adventure instead of interrupting it. By the final beat, Hans, the meerkat, and the camel are simply enjoying the solution together.
The Arctic
THE SECRET OF STAYING COOL.
Hans had already been established as a quasi-European, quasi-mystical underwear guru. These concepts pushed him beyond the familiar spokesman setup and into a stranger little narrative world.
He arrives by motorcycle, confides in a penguin, dives beneath the ice, meets a narwhal, and eventually shares the secret beside a living ice figure. The circumstances become increasingly absurd. Hans does not. His complete sincerity is what holds the comedy together.
Character Performance
CREATURES OF COMFORT.
The animals reinforce the environments, but they also have jobs as characters. The camel is pleasantly oblivious. The meerkat is mischievous but helpful. The penguin is stunned by Hans's revelation. The narwhal is delighted by it.
Those reactions are tiny pieces of screen time, but they make the worlds feel inhabited and give the comedy somewhere to land without competing with the product message.
From Boards to Screen
ART IN MOTION.
The animatics test the boards as timed sequences—reveals, reactions, transitions, product beats and jokes playing at commercial speed. Dunes then moved into production as the finished Hanes spot.
The Result
SURVIVING POST-PRODUCTION
Dunes moved from script, to storyboard, to animatic into a finished Hanes commercial with its charm, magical realism, and visuals intact. The value of the boards was that they allowed everyone downstream to see the vision and build toward a common goal.
It is exciting to see the flourishes that were added after my involvement, but it is rewarding to see that the bulk of the design choices I made remained visible in the final video.
Every idea leads somewhere.
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