DARK HAMMER
Client: Olsen Creative Co., for The US Army Cyber Institute at West Point
Services: Art Direction, Illustration, Storyboards
The team at Olsen Creative Company needed help finding experienced artists to help tell a peculiar type of story. Their writer, Brian David Johnson, had been working alongside military experts at the US Army Cyber Institute at West Point to develop “threatcasting” scenarios; that is, coming up with possible future threats to national security based on emerging technologies. Brian developed these scenarios into actual short story ideas to be used for educating policymakers about the dangers of what might happen if these technologies were to be used by enemy combatants or terrorists.
OCC needed experienced storytellers to bring their concepts to life, so they called on us, based on our prior work with SciFutures, who specialize in “science fiction prototyping” for corporate clients. OCC needed us to assemble teams of artists to illustrate seven stories in a variety of art styles, two of which would be enhanced into motion-comics that included animated visuals and sounds (see videos embedded below).