By Mindy Charski

Smash! The realization that your car has been hit is an awful one, and new ads for Liberty Mutual use photography from Erik Almas help viewers imagine those confusing initial moments. The work, created by Hill Holliday, conveys a reassuring message about the client’s offerings: With “benefits that ease your mind,” at least you won’t need to think about insurance issues after a  collision.

“We’re trying to really get to what happens if an accident happens to you,” says Boston-based art director Eric Shi.

To help generate a connection with the viewer, the drivers’ thoughts are communicated through handwritten typeface, which “draws you in and really gives a personality to the whole thing,” Shi says. Likewise, the thoughts needed to be complemented with at least a hint of a thinker. In one ad, the viewer sees a shadow of a confounded driver approaching a car that has been sideswiped.

In the other execution, a driver’s car has just been hit from the side while moving, and a hand is holding a rear-view mirror to look back. “We really want to make the viewer feel like, ‘Hey, that could have been me,’ or ‘Hey, that is me,’” Shi says.

San Francisco-based Almas has shot other Liberty Mutual assignments for the agency. “We really like the way his work looks,” the AD says. “And he always tries to push the limit a little bit.”

Almas needed to work around a television crew’s schedule, and he says the biggest challenge of the assignment was time. “We solved this by exploring the locations and shooting our background plates before the shoot,” he says. “Going into the shoot days our backgrounds and angles were all set and we were able to photograph our talent and the cars in the very short time frame we had to execute.”

The team didn’t actually crash the cars. Rather, they bought new parts, destroyed those, and put them on the rented vehicles for the shoot. Retouching was handled by Erik Pawassar at Jellysquare in San Francisco.

The effort is part of the insurer’s overarching “Responsibility. What’s your policy?” campaign that broke in 2006. The ads target those who already have auto insurance from the Boston-based company and those who do not. The work broke in September and is running through November; publications include Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and Time.