How Your Epic Windows Wallpapers are Captured
Halo animator and filmmaker Will Christiansen takes you to the Arctic
The heart of a designer demands to create. An innate longing to tell stories, solve problems, and bring visual intelligence to the world. That heart and drive tends to bleed from full-time work into independent ventures — anything it takes to keep exploring, keep discovering, keep making.
Will Christiansen is one of those dynamic designers. As a Halo animator at Microsoft, his job is already demanding; delivering spot-on artistry for the Halo series on Xbox. But he’s also creator, owner, and director of SKÝ FÓLK, a conservation-minded multi-media company, because passion goes by many names. Will travels the world in pursuit of epic landscapes and artistic epiphanies that only come from traversing the remote, brutal corners of the planet.
Will’s latest adventure found him in Baffin Island, an empty Eden in Northern Canada, the type of place where polar bears roam and mountains reach into a majestic sky. The expedition was part pleasure, part business — Will was asked to capture landscapes for Windows Themes (wallpaper, for those of us in the Windows Classic vernacular) on his trip. He happily agreed, and upon return from The North, shared his ethos on design, creativity, and the relentless pursuit of passion. Here are his thoughts:
Why does adventure call to you? What led you to create SKÝ FÓLK, to seek the wild, to make art out of exploring?
WC: I think that as I’ve gotten older and explored more and more, adventure has come to mean the pursuit of growth. For me, it is about seeking the unknown, putting faith in not knowing, seeking situations that will wake up my sleeping mind and connect me to the bigger picture. I have always loved the act, the process of being creative in some way, building, painting, designing, animating, sculpting, all of that stuff. I’ve taken pictures the whole time and landscape and outdoor photography has come to rest very perfectly with my pursuit of personal growth. The process of landscape photography for me involves finding a place or experience I find beautiful and truly seeing it. The camera almost acts as a mechanism to focus that sight, to be a place, not just to look at it, but to see the story and feel it too. I can’t get enough, every mountain is different, every glacier, every sunrise, infinite challenge, an infinite struggle that I actively choose.
What’s your flow state like as a Halo animator? What about when you’re capturing for SKÝ FÓLK? What do you enjoy about each?
WC: Like every creative pursuit, I start with intention and I pop out of time. Entire days can pass and I don’t notice. They both create such presence in me that my mind doesn’t spend energy recognizing time. Also, both activities require good planning and a solid process. In animation, I enjoy the act of creating an experience for someone, something that was static when I started and the end result is an experience full of human emotions for the people who take part in it. Photography for me has similarities, in that I’m bringing someone into an experience. But the act of finding a moment to capture and the process itself to do it successfully is very different, often requiring hours of hard physical activity followed by long hours of sitting still, waiting for the light to combine with the composition to tell the story of the place. In photography, a lot is left up to chance, in animation, nothing is. Doing both strikes a balance inside me that is very fulfilling.
There’s a lot you can’t control as an adventure photographer. What do you do to make it work? What makes a great image?
WC: Yes! So true! I think the act of surrendering to that lack of control, surrendering to randomness, is addictive for me. My best images almost always come in the moments of complete surrender to weather, to closed roads, to stolen equipment. There is something that happens in that surrender; I think it creates a space for me to really start seeing. It forces me to drop preconceptions about what I thought a place would give me. A great image is one that does something to its viewer, it adds something to their life through its story, its depth, its ability to bring the viewer to the experience. Like all art, a great image has various technical achievements as well; composition, story, creativity, expressed in an appealing way. But what makes something truly great is a higher achievement than making or capturing a technically beautiful thing — it needs to make people feel; to actively appeal to what drives them as a human.
In your understanding, what does it mean to be an artist?
WC: In my opinion, to be an artist is to choose to share one’s own experience and to help other people embody an altered state of consciousness. Art, I think, is about helping people see themselves, experience themselves, in a new way.
Why did you choose Baffin Island as a location?
WC: I am a firm believer that all life is choice. That even the struggles we have in our lives are chosen. Choosing a trek that requires me to lug a 72 lb. backpack over deep bogs and rocky moraines in extreme Arctic conditions is the kind of struggle I want in my life, the pay-offs being the beauty, the remoteness, the expansion of my spirit.
Tell us about the moments you captured for Windows Themes. What are you hoping to give people, to say to people, with your images?
WC: Well frankly, I have a bit of a competitive streak in me and having been both an Apple user and a Microsoft user, I wanted to directly be a part of Microsoft’s push to become a creative haven, and contribute to a beautiful user experience. Currently Windows computers are far more powerful for creative professionals, from film editing/color grading to photography, and the Windows Creators Update is a sign of the changing winds. We have all these wonderful Surface devices that people truly love, with beautiful design and more speed, and I want them to have equally beautiful finishing touches down to their lock screens and wallpapers. Creative people care about those kinds of things and Apple has understood that their computers need to make people feel like creative professionals, even if they aren’t. So, they’ve had these absolutely beautiful photos of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains, etc., and I thought, Microsoft can do better. Photography has the power to bring experiences from faraway places right to the desktop. SKÝ FÓLK’s Baffin Island adventure, high in the Arctic and extremely hard to get to, fit the bill perfectly.
Why is it important to you to document, to create? What drives you?
WC: There is a part of me that really wants to share the experience and to connect people with nature. Now is a really important time in our own evolution as humans I think and we have an opportunity to come together and take care of our ecosystem, but that awareness only comes after people are stoked about being outside and realize the value that adventure or the simple, rustling silence of an Aspen grove brings to our lives. So part of my personal mission is to try to create experiences for people that draws them out, to find peace inside themselves and to begin to inspire others as well. I want to add to life, and photography and filmmaking is my way to do that.
Download Will’s beautiful Windows Themes from Microsoft, and follow SKÝ FÓLK on Instagram.
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