Creative Review: Roger
10.15.2014
This summer, years of study, hard work and ingenuity paid off for the team at LA-based production company Roger.
After pitching alongside several other companies for a chance to promote this summer's Simpsons marathon on FXX, Roger was chosen among a few other agencies to create pieces leading up to and during the 12-day, 552-episode marathon.
Roger had previously worked with FXX, having created a part-animated, part-live action campaign for the show Chozen, an animated comedy starring SNL's Bobby Moynihan and Method Man.
The multifaceted campaign for FXX's Simpsons marathon encompassed several production companies' work, each piece showcasing that company's expertise. For Roger, that meant a series of animated idents using the FXX logo that morphed into iconic Simpsons characters and images, including Marge's hair and Lisa's saxophone. Each brief ident also highlighted signature sound bites from the show that would be easily recognizable to fans who weren't even watching (Homer's D'oh, Ned Flanders' okely dokely do). "Most of us are huge Simpsons fans," said Terry Lee, executive creative director at Roger. "It was almost like we've been studying for this for 20-plus years, every day at 7 p.m. after school."
The team's challenge was taking all of that Simpsons institutional knowledge and transforming it into a minimalistic, animated look that elevated the series' characters while boiling them down to simple imagery.
Lee says this project reflects an overall aesthetic of Roger's that is explained in the company's mantra, "Roger, loud and clear." He explains the studio's design principle as "fun, quirky and bold," which for this instance, fit in quite nicely with FXX. Drew Neujahr, director of business development at Roger, and Executive Producer Josh Libitsky agree that its "fun, quirky and bold" reputation comes from constant collaboration with people of different and varying talents.
"We believe great collaboration produces the best work," said Lee. "We take great effort to make sure our office is comprised of people with different talents. We don't look for one type of person to work here. That's another reason our work is so varied - we like bringing different talents together to create a unique vision."
Their unique vision has translated into working consistently in the media marketing industry since the studio started in 2007, and Lee credits Brett Ashy, president of The Ashy Agency in LA, with much of their early success. "He's just a powerhouse in the industry," said Lee. "He was able to open up a lot of doors."
Those doors he helped open were big names in the business, too, including ABC, VH1 and the NBA.
Some of the earliest clients remain repeat customers to this day. ABC, who hired Roger to work on three seasons of Dancing with the Stars, is also one of their most recent clients. When The View wanted to rebrand ahead of this September's relaunch, they called on Roger to create a series of short spots to promote the change in hosts that signaled a "new View."
Roger was actually brought on to the project much earlier, when they were hired to shoot a new show open for The View, but in the middle of working on it, Jenny McCarthy and Sherri Shepherd quit the show. So they started from scratch with a whole new look for the reimagined show ABC had in mind, now with the team of Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, Rosie Perez and Nicolle Wallace.
The project, which had to come together over only a few weeks, involved a new logo, a promo toolkit for ABC and a show open, in which Roger had to add the names of the newly announced cast just hours before airtime.
Fifteen-second promos ran leading up to the revamped show's premiere on Sept. 15, sending out positive messages about change. In one (above), it asks "Who says a zebra can't change its stripes?" Another, below, shows a slot machine spewing out quarters to say that change is good, and another features an Etch-A-Sketch "shaking things up" on a whole new View.
Another repeat client of Roger's is Lifetime, who worked with the production company to create two of the network's most well-known branding packages for its unscripted series, Dance Moms, as well as projects for Devious Maids and its social redesign earlier this year. The first, playing on the '80s film Flashdance, is set to the song "Maniac" and features popular scenes from the movie featuring Dance Moms' young performers and their instructor, Abby.
The live-action promo was a huge hit, and led to a second year of working with Lifetime on a similar project for the show. The second round, "Take on Abby," a play on A-ha's "Take on Me," won a PromaxBDA Gold Award for its part-live action and part-animated spot. Roger's Lee says that these promos were a result of brainstorming about how to promote a show and explain its premise, while taking advantage of the fun, dramatic, theatrical nature of the brand at the same time.
"These parody spots do a good job of finding a beloved video that combines all of those into one story," said Lee. "There's always dancing, there's always Abby as the teacher, and the moms who were always thwarted."
Lee says after the popularity of the first project, they knew they wanted to spoof another popular '80s hit, they just had to narrow down the choices. In the end, the iconic song and its accompanying music video seemed like the obvious choice. "'Take on Me' was something we had all decided on almost a year before this thing got made," said Lee. "We started doing research, started figuring out how to create that look, but we basically knew." Both spots were created with Lifetime's Aaron Goldman, VP of on-air brand creative and Producer Karen Griffenhagen.
The latest Dance Moms project also illustrates how Roger incorporates varying strengths of its multitalented team into a single look, often combining live-action footage with 3D animation, mixing up design disciplines until they find the right fit. This approach is found in Roger's Survival Guides project for Syfy, as well as in work for FX's Chozen, Nickelodeon and AMC. So what's next for the downtown LA studio that does it all? Other than several network rebrands in the works, a project for TV Land and wrapping up a project for E!, Roger just wants to keep growing and keep learning.
"The scope of our projects is now much bigger, in all aspects of production. We handle live action, visual effects, multi-spot campaigns, multiplatform design, writing, producing…" said Lee. "We have grown creatively into the storytellers we want to be."