Animated Series · Global Rescue · 2025
Rescue Tales
Real rescues, redrawn, so the brand never has to say trust us.
The most persuasive story the brand had was one no camera was there for.
Global Rescue’s best marketing was never a feature list. It was what actually happened when a member called from the worst day of their life. But that footage doesn’t exist, the locations are impossibly remote, and the moments are far too intense to stage.
Animation turned the constraint into the idea. A graphic-novel style let the camera go where no camera could: a helicopter setting down across a glacial river, a village a day-and-a-half from the nearest road. It also gave two rescues on opposite sides of the planet one coherent look.
The style carries the emotion as well as the information. Color carries the arc: vibrant greens cooling to blue-grey as isolation deepens, then warming again at the moment of rescue. Each film opens on place, moves through jeopardy, and lands where every Global Rescue story lands. The team shows up.
Both films were built shot-for-shot from a storyboard, 66 boards across the two, and voiced as a first-person account by the people who ran the mission. That was the decision the series rests on. A narrator would have made these ads; the people who ran the call describing it themselves makes them testimony. The brand never has to say trust us. The rescue says it.
It also worked. Across eleven months on MNTN the two films returned $49,503 on $15,059 of media. That was the highest return of any creative concept the account measured, at a cost per acquisition 39% below the account average.
Creative Direction
When I joined the team, the idea of using animation to tell real rescue stories had already been tried once, without the result the team hoped for. I saw an opportunity to bring the idea back, find the right production partner, and make it work as a repeatable creative asset for both organic and paid channels.
Working closely with my team and Animwood Studios, I directed the visual language, style, and final product across the series. We developed a graphic-novel-inspired approach, a distinct color arc, and a visual tone that could convey the seriousness of an injury without exploiting it.
Choosing which real cases could carry a thirty-second story became an important part of the creative process. Most rescues are procedural. The strongest stories had a place worth being in, a turn, and a resolution that didn’t need explaining.
The Series
01 British Columbia, Canada
Trapped in the Backcountry
A solo hiker snaps an ankle miles from help with the light fading. A helicopter can't land, so the team fords a glacial river and cuts a path through dense forest with chainsaws.
Storyboard
The first episode had to establish the entire series in thirty seconds: the look, the pace, and the promise that this is a real account. So it opens on place. A hiker alone on a ridge, the valley opening behind him, no threat anywhere in frame. The wilderness has to feel worth being in before it’s allowed to become dangerous.
The chainsaws are the hinge. A rack of them loaded beside the medical packs is the detail that makes the story feel real. It’s an unexpected image, but that’s precisely why it works. The episode is built around the moment the viewer stops feeling like they’re watching an ad.
02 Finisterre Range, Papua New Guinea
Jungle Rescue
A nine-year-old crashes his bike a day-and-a-half hike and a boat ride from the nearest care. Global Rescue coordinates a helicopter evacuation and onward transfer to surgery.
Storyboard
The patient is nine years old, which created a different creative problem. The emotional power of a child’s injury is also exactly what can make it exploitative. So the film gives the injury a single beat and puts the focus on the rescue itself: the hike out, the boat, the helicopter, the transfer.
It also had to prove the series could travel. Same visual language, an entirely different palette: saturated jungle green against the procedural calm of the evacuation, and a whole village turning out to watch the helicopter land. If the two films had read as the work of two different studios, there would be no series, only spots.
Credits
Creative Direction, Concept & Art Direction
Joseph Lambert
Script
Charles McCarthy
Pre-Production
Allie Savage
Animation & Production
Animwood Studios
