Anchor

Anchor is the Harbor Picture Company's proprietary platform for end-to-end film and TV production management and workflow review. A one-stop shop, where your entire creative efforts are collated, live and secure. We developed the brand strategy and tone of voice before designing the brand identity, website and platform.

PROJECT
Brand Strategy
TOV
Brand Identity
Platform Design
Website Design

The Brief

Harbor engaged WMT to give the Anchor brand and platform a complete refresh. With a target audience encompassing everyone from film studio heads to post-production assistants, they sought a brand that resonated with both the head and the heart, the technical and the emotional. And they needed a platform which answered its users' call for simplicity, elegance and dynamism.

The Thinking

Our research and discussions with the creative minds at the Harbor Picture Company, uncovered the brand truth: Film is the most direct expression of collective creative joy, and nothing should get in its way. An all-embracing space that balances the flow of mixed emotions and workstreams.

Filmmaking is inspirational, aspirational and liberating. Anchor may be a digital tool for the technical world of film and advertising, but they are all about positive, human, creative experiences. People supporting people. Anchor open up the conditions necessary for pure creativity, where multiple disciplines can realise their vision - big or small - from a single, extensive and secure source of truth.

We called this Expansive Clarity.

The Solution

The strategic position of Expansive Clarity called for brand imagery that truly lived up to the core values we developed for the brand: Unlimited Scaleability, Unimpeded Collaboration and the Ultimate Expressions of Art. We used collage to combine beautiful and majestic landscapes with incongruously placed human to create worlds of pure creativity, collation and collaboration, all key aspects of the Anchor brand.

Whilst the brief was to create an identity that could live on its own in the spacious world we created, we also needed a nod to the parent brand, the Harbor Picture Company. To do this we replicated the distinctive A shape from the Harbor logo using Dazzed Bold – a cinematic sans-serif typeface – and adding a loading animation in the A to reference the agility and speed of the Anchor platform.

We paired this logo and hero typeface with Domaine Text, ‘a sharp, elegant serif with curvaceous Latin detailing’ to give contrast to the weight and power of Dazzed.

The Platform

Anchor users are a mix of film studios, executives, editors, post-production and creatives, but all require a sophisticated, efficient tool for managing production media and video rendering, working in high-end TV, film and advertising.

We designed two platforms: a full-featured desktop version and a simpler IOS app for mobile and tablet.

Despite the sometimes complicated and powerful nature of the platform, the UX needed to be simple and easy to use. The UI was designed to maximise desktop screen space and enable seamless navigation between multiple projects (potentially 1,000+) and departments.