I’m a hands-on Creative Director, Art Director, Illustrator and Maker with over twenty years of professional experience and a track record for creating thumb-stopping social creative and developing high-performing teams. So yes… I’ve been around the block a few times; and starting my career post-grad in a small town and exhausting all the creative roles there meant that I learned a lot—but the job titles I had never matched what I did. I led all Creative for Dippin’ Dots, Inc. for over five years—and helped develop “Minion Madness Cookie Dough” as a co-branded tie-in with Illumination Entertainment when the first “Despicable Me” came out—but my title there was only ever “Designer.” I’ve driven initiatives for scalable digital creative solutions in addition to leading custom social content and video productions that resulted in double-digit sales increases. My career began in print design and gave me a strong grounding in production specs and “doing work right the first time” to avoid costly reprints. I’ve championed the power of social and new media; leading the launch of Facebook for Dippin’ Dots, Inc. (2007) and TikTok for Arby’s (2018) and The Home Depot (2022). I empower and challenge my teams to think strategically—not just creatively—as we work to elevate the brands we touch and make content that resonates with our audiences. I enjoy passing along what I’ve learned and teach new shooting, editing and software techniques to my teams on a regular basis to help everyone develop new skills. I’ve worked freelance, long-term contract, in-house and agency-side as a single contributor on a larger Marketing team as well as a Creative team leader and mentor—hence the number of titles that don’t accurately reflect the job I was hired to do. I identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and proudly bring my whole self to every role. I’ve won awards for my work, including a Cannes Silver Lion and a Shorty Award for Art Direction; but the one that means the most to me is the HOW Design award for the wedding invitations I created for my husband and me in 2014.
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The Home Depot - Halloween 2022

Trade School work for The Home Depot | July 2022

In late Spring 2022, The Home Depot's Organic Social Team approached Trade School about making two pieces of content to highlight the launch of their Halloween assortment:

  1. A "human interest video" about the team who makes the Holiday merchandise every year, specifically the Halloween assortment
  2. A video highlighting user-generated content around their 12-foot-skeleton, Skelly

The Home Depot doesn't run any paid ads for Halloween: it's a mark of the success of their products that they sell out as soon as the new assortment goes live online. The two videos we were making were literally to give the Organic Social Team content to post to drive engagement about how fanatical people are about Skelly.

The Human Interest Video: Interview with Lance Allen

Lance Allen is the "Decorative Holiday Merchant" at The Home Depot... and it's obvious from first meeting him that he LOVES Halloween.

We knew Lance could talk for days about every piece in the Halloween product assortment, so I chose to do his video as a live interview rather than write a script and have Lance memorize a bunch of lines. I'd ask him some fairly standard questions and we could do several takes to allow him to give us very short answers or extremely long ones. I would then take the transcript of the interview and build the video based on the sound bites we got from him.

And that's exactly what we did.

We ran this shoot with what Trade School refers to as a "Small Gear" team: me as Interviewer, Roger Okamoto as DP and Brandon Jones as Producer. We also managed to bring two of our Apprentices (Interns) to assist Roger moving the gear in and out and our Program Director, Christina Cilento. The clients from the Organic Social Team on set outnumbered the Trade School team almost two to one!

I think Kris had the most fun with this video... when the clients gave him free rein to add as much animation as he wanted on top of the scenic footage provided by Alderman, he had a blast.

The final video was cut to a 16:9 for YouTube, a 1:1 for Facebook and Instagram in-feed, and a 9:16 for IGTV (now Instagram Reels).

The UGC Video: Skelly's Photo Album

Skelly is a big part of The Home Depot's success at Halloween.

"Big" as in a 12-foot-tall part of it.

So big, in fact, that many people who own a Skelly leave him up year-round versus trying to find somewhere to store him. There are several Facebook groups dedicated to the owners of 12-foot Skeletons and what they do with them outside of Halloween.

Our clients contacted several people who had posted and tagged The Home Depot across Facebook and Instagram; and with their permission, we were asked to make a "slideshow" video. Allison did much better than that.

The only hitch in our storyboards was not having a good photo of Skelly's hand to start it off, so I took one on my iPhone the day we filmed Lance's interview.

The final video was cut to both a 16:9 for Facebook and Instagram in-feed and a 9:16 for IGTV (now Instagram Reels).

The Team

Scott Hunt, Creative Director

Allison Rose, Art Director

Reed Alliston, Copywriter

Roger Okamoto, Producer, Director of Photography, Editor

Brandon Jones, Sr. Producer

Ariel Thomas, Production Apprentice

Kris Boban, Animator, VFX Editor

Christina Cilento, Program Director

William Owusu, Partnerships Apprentice
← @thesaucepump
→ The Home Depot – TikTok Channel Launch

Wanna find me elsewhere?

Take a look at my cut paper artwork that has moved its way over to Instagram, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
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