FatCat Digital CORPORATE OFFICE 414 Jackson Street, Suite 304 San Francisco, CA 94111 Tel: (415) 981-7400 Fax: (415) 981-7450 www.fatcatdigital.com	HOURLY RATES: Varies by job. PRIMARY EQUIPMENT: Four Mac-based artist workstations, ScanMate 11000 Drum Scanner, Epson 9600, 7000, 5000 & 3000 printers calibrated for various outputs ranging from CMYK proofs to fine-art portfolios. SPEED OF TURNAROUND: “As much time as our clients give us.”	SAMPLE CLIENTS: Professional photographers, design studios and advertising agencies, among the latter Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, R&R Partners, Campbell Mithun, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, VitroRobertson PRINCIPAL PARTNERS: Kate Chase and Jim Erickson CONTACT: Kate Chase, kate@fatcatdigital.com

FATCAT DIGITAL

	© audi/photos by jim erickson

Commercial photographer Jim Erickson founded FatCat Digital in 1992 when he first employed a digital assistant for his projects. Ten years and three locations later, the retouching studio is now a sustainable San Francisco-based business, staffed by five full-timers plus other local freelance retouchers, illustrators and graphic designers.
The campaign that best represents the studio to date is its “Signs” campaign created for the McKinney + Silver agency and Audi. The multi-ad campaign shows Audi automobiles driving through magnificent locations. McKinney art director Bob Ranew brought the campaign to Erickson, who worked on the images with FatCat staff retoucher Wes Hardison.

Erickson shot the base images at a number of locations in northern and central California—Mount Diablo, Pacific Coast Highway, the rural mountain valleys of central California, and urban San Francisco. One of the most stunning images from thecampaign shows the Audi model A6 2.7T driving in the foreground of San Fran’s Bay Bridge. “Every time you look at most shots of cars with a city background, they’re really kind of boring,” Erickson said. So he set out to create “a new world.”

He said the agency wanted a campaign that conveyed a sense of romance of the road, one that showed “not only a beautiful place to drive, but when you look at the whole car, you can sense its speed and maneuverability. You sense you want to be there,” he explained.

Needing an urban location, Erickson remembered he had a stock image of the San Francisco skyline taken beneath the Bay Bridge. Creating the campaign, he complemented that image by shooting multiple images: a more dramatic sky, a tripod-supported shot of the Audi parked on a wet road, and a high-contrast, rain-slickened roadway. He worked to make sure the images complemented his base Bay Bridge shot in perspective and volume, noting, “If the light in one element is coming from the wrong direction, the viewer’s eye will detect it and dismiss the campaign as nonfactual.”

With the elements captured on his Mac, Hardison placed the image of the roadway beneath the bridge, actually combining a couple images to create the final road. He then placed the car on the road, altering the angle of the car and banking the road. Then he blurred the wheels to suggest motion. He composited the sky from two images.

Erickson notes that the art director and agency were perfectionists about the appearance of the car and the final image, wanting the car to fit the location “like the stones fit in the pyramid. The challenge was to match the light, the perspective of the car, the right shape, form, volume, the feel like it’s moving. It appears simple, but it requires a lot of planning and study.”

Finally, the picture’s color was altered to a sleek, modern but warm monochromatic silver-blue. Erickson said the goal was to give the viewer’s eye a rest. “We wanted it to appear as though it were dreamlike, to give a disciplined, subtle feeling to it, give it a timeless quality.”

Kate Chase says Audi was proud of the campaign, as was FatCat and Erickson. “What’s great about the retouching in that picture is, you put all those extraneous elements together and the final image makes another photographer say, ‘Where is that location, my scout should have gotten me something like that.’ The ideal locations might not exist,” says Erickson.

— John Courtmanche