Brave Wilderness—a YouTube channel headed by Coyote Peterson—was making the jump from online to broadcast with their new show Brave the Wild on Animal Planet. I worked to define the show’s graphic aesthetic, and from there, oversee the production all of the assets needed for their first season.
We began with exploring the logo/title treatment, as this would inform the look and feel of the rest of the graphics that followed. NOTE: About halfway through the design process, the show’s title was changed from Beyond Brave to Coyote Peterson: Brave the Wild.
From there, the team began building out the other assets needed for the show, including a fully customizable, realistic Earth that worked natively in After Effects. The template makes use of the VC Orb plugin as well as 8K texture maps. It also gave the Brave Wilderness team the ability to search for locations by name, and have the show’s location marker auto-snap to that location in 3D space, making the setup and rendering of these maps (over 15 in total) simple and easy.
Another huge undertaking for this project was the illustrated animal fact portion of the show, known as infopods. Our idea was to present these like Coyote himself takes notes in the field—through a journal. For these sections, we made over 50 custom illustrations of interesting animal facts and brought them to life through subtle camera moves and animation.
Proposed Infopod Style Final Infopod Style
Credits
Client: Wilderness Productions | Animal Planet
Director: Karl Hein
Producer: Kate Wilke
Designers: Karl Hein, Jonny Sidlo, Audrey Stemen
Illustrator: Christine Lee
Animator: Karl Hein
Editor: Kurt Keaner