Delivering a new car doesn’t exactly sound exciting, unless it’s the top secret new model Lexus and you have a wildcard driver and a gang of ne’er-do-wells out to steal it. In Skinny NYC, Stink Digital and Skunk’s interactive adventure “Dark Ride”, consumers are tasked with getting the new car to LA unscratched. We spoke to director James Brown about creating and directing a non-linear story about a car that didn’t yet exist.

Traversing through the depths of hell can be a monumental task, but animation studio Nathan Love, New York was more than game when it took on creative director duties for the in-game narrative cinematics of new EA title Dante’s Inferno.

When Rick Rubin was putting the finishing touches on Johnny Cash’s final album he had trouble thinking up a visual to accompany the single “Ain’t No Grave”, the Man in Black’s final recording. Fortunately for the mega-producer, director Chris Milk happened to have an idea on the back-burner that inventively combined both archival imagery with animation in a manner befitting of Cash’s defiant-to-the-end attitude.

You can glean a lot of life lessons from the pages of children’s books - like exactly what to do when one loses their head? That’s the journey that Passion Pictures’ director Yu Sato takes his protagonist on in the music promo for Berlin-based indie electronic outfit Lali Puna and their single “That Day.” Sato discusses the creative process behind the work and shares a gallery of character development sketches.

The R8 Spyder is Audi’s most expensive car, so naturally one might expect its television commercial to take place on a winding, non-descript mountainous road shrouded in morning mist and flanked by a lush, CG forested landscape. Instead, BBH, London plopped the angelic-looking auto down in the midst of vintage mod car derby in an East London warehouse shrouded in exhaust.

Scottish satirist Thomas Carlyle wasn’t quite right in his assessment that history is one great dust heap. Rather it’s a living, breathing force that has the power to push civilization forward. Such is the message behind History Channel’s identity spot “Factory”. Directed by Ghost Robot’s Adam Levite, the spot constructs an origin story around the specialty channel’s newest design element - the propel.

Rock band OK Go scored a major viral hit earlier this month with “This Too Shall Pass”, a music video starring a crafty Rube Goldberg machine. Boards spoke with OK Go’s Damian Kulash, director James Frost, creative engineer Adam Sadowsky and producer Shirley Moyers to get the story behind the video’s six-month production.

A commercial shoot is often an exercise in balance; or more specifically, it’s a balancing act between the whims of the creatives, the director’s vision, the client’s concerns and the producer’s acute awareness of the forces of nature and circumstance. That equilibrium was attained on the set of Mother, New York’s New Balance 365 Project, a series of micro-films that are being released daily via a microsite and iPhone app.

The 82nd annual Academy Awards take place in Los Angeles this weekend, and while the world wonders whether Avatar can put the hurt on The Hurt Locker, we’ll be watching the Best Animated Short Film category to find out if Logorama’s gun-toting Ronald McDonald can spoil Wallace and Gromit’s Oscar streak.

When we decided to dedicate our March issue to Innovation, we turned to Nexus Productions to develop an interactive cover that would articulate its themes. The company’s producers brought on board their newly-signed artists Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille who created Rise and Fall, a stunning interactive experience that takes design and storytelling to the next level.