Radar featured in SourceEcreative “Kids & Critters” issue
Esteemed client Radar Studios is profiled by SourceEcreative editor/writer Anthony Vagnoni in their “Kids & Critters” Special Feature which hit the interwebs this week. Check out the story HERE.
Radar’s Artist-Driven Studio Captures Kids’ Sense of Play
Highly collaborative and inclusive, Director Don Hoeg and his crew make great use of their concept-to-completion production approach.
We asked Don Hoeg, co-founder and one of the leading forces at Chicago’s Radar Studios, to describe the vibe of the place, and it didn’t take him long to get rolling.
“We designed this place to be a haven for artists,” he says with the kind of enthusiasm that jaded East Coast scribes like me always attribute to native Midwesterners. “The vibe is informal, and we place a high value on collaboration.” The layout is centered around a core space he calls “the artists’ pit,” with the rooms for editors, compositing, visual effects and finishing arrayed around it in a hub and spoke format.
We love that he calls it a pit. It conjures up so many great images, like the editorial bullpens of old, where bantering reporters slaved over manual typewriters and layout people juggled headlines and photos, all of them crafting compelling stories on deadline.
Update this to 2011 and change the content from news and features to web videos and TV spots and the Radar picture starts to come into focus. Since its founding in 1999 by Hoeg and his fellow visual effects artist John Truckenbrod, Radar has pioneered the concept of the one-stop production model that can take projects from concept to completion. They were one of the first in the Chicago market to be structured in this manner, and they cut their teeth on work coming out of shops like Burnett and FCB, now Draftfcb.
The studio prides itself on not just offering an eclectic mix of production services, but on being a haven for an elective mix of artists, designers and directors, according to EP Lisa Masseur. Together they’ve produced work for a wide range of brands, everything from Kellogg’s to McDonald’s, Nintendo to Hasbro, Airheads to Playskool. It’s like the old circus come-ons: they produce work for children of all ages, and often their parents, too.
Hoeg says that in creating the Radar culture, they intentionally tried to distinguish themselves from the slick and too-cool environs of some production and post houses, where edit and design suites were hidden away behind sleek interiors. “It’s kind of ironic, but by not building a formal environment for our agency clients, we’ve created one where they prefer to hang out,” he comments. “We opened in the days of marble counter tops and two receptionists standing guard, and that’s not us. We’re a working studio where everyone is invited to contribute and share ideas.” “And that leads to a high degree of collaboration,” adds Masseur. “Projects here are always evolving. It’s a very high-energy feeling that you get when you walk in the door.”
Anchoring the directing corps is Hoeg himself, an affable and approachable talent who’s clearly passionate about what he does. He got his start on the effects side of the business, and says he gradually began shooting his own live action components mostly to have greater control over the final product. Over the years he went from being an effects guy who shot to a director with a background in effects; the distinction is subtle yet significant.
The Radar director roster expanded last year with the signing of Danny J. Boyle and the team of Walter Robot, which is actually Bill Barminski and Christopher Louie. They joined Director Sam Macon, who was added to the roster in 2008. A friend of a producer at Radar, Macon came to see Masseur when he was just starting out, and she advised him on what he needed to do to get to the next level. “He went out and shot a reel full of spec spots and we added him to the roster,” she says. The move paid off – Macon, who was a top ten finalist in the initial Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” consumer-generated ad contest, has been working on bigger projects and bigger brands since then. Most recently, he directed a music video through Radar for the group Cave Singers titled “Black Leaf.” Like much of his work, it reflects a mix of styles and techniques.
Boyle is a highly experienced comedy and performance director who, years ago, found that he had a knack for getting easy, natural performances out of kids. From his first kids spot – an Upper Deck classic from Chiat\Day starring the hoops and gridiron stars Karl Malone and Lawrence Taylor – he’s expanded his kids’ reel to include a wide range of work for both kid-oriented and adult-oriented brands and campaigns.
He’s also branched out into episodic and sketch comedy work for broadcast, including work that’s run on Fox, Comedy Central and the Disney Channel. He’s perhaps best known for his work with the loose-cannon “Mad TV” character known as Bon Qui Qui, whose comedy routines have proven to be a huge hit on YouTube.
The Walter Robot team, who’s based in L.A., as is Boyle, is a mixed-media duo whose work includes everything from music videos to art installations and digital media.
The company sees itself as a nontraditional entity that excels at mixed media projects which fuse live action production, visual effects, editing and animation. “Our approach is designed to identify unique solutions by being receptive to shared creative insights,” Masseur says. “Clients get to share the communal experience as creative partners, and I think that helps us produce really targeted content that’s youthful, energetic, experimental and innovative.”
“Our goal in the beginning was to build a team of artists that really collaborated and worked together, and that’s where we are today,” says Hoeg. He says that much of their success has come from a variety of factors; The quality of the work they produce, the wide range of services they can provide and the inclusive way they interact with agencies has generated tons of repeat business. “We’ve done ten or twenty spots for the same clients,” he explains. “The volume of work we’ve had has allowed us to build the team we have today.” Currently, Radar’s core group of full-timers numbers about 20. “This is what makes this place tick,” he says.
What’s had the greatest impact on Radar’s work?
“I think it was the fact that, from our very origins, we assumed full responsibility for the jobs we did,” says Hoeg. He points out that while this concept-to-completion model is becoming more commonplace now, it was a rarity when they opened. “By working this way, it became all about the job and not about who did what,” he adds. “And even before we got into kids marketing, it was our level of collaboration that helped build the studio. People would call us not even knowing what our solution was going to be. They’d say, ‘We have an idea, what do you think?’ And we could give them a range of options. That kind of flexibility is great for agencies. They know they can call us and get people who know from beginning to end how to produce their commercial.”
Dan Lombardi, a Creative Director on Hasbro at New York agency Uproar!, might be inclined to agree. He first got connected with Radar via Lisa Masseur, with whom he’d worked years ago when she was with noted Chicago-based kids director Bob Ebel.
What attracted him to Radar was not just the studio’s one-stop structure, but Hoeg’s ability to take advantage of it. “We saw Don’s work for McDonald’s that used photo animation and we loved it,” he says. “It had a fun, graphic look that matched what we were looking for.”
Lombardi has since shot numerous jobs with Radar, and has worked with the studio both as a one-stop solution and as a more traditional live action production company. “When they can handle a job and wrap it up into one little package, that’s a very efficient way to work,” he observes.
What’s been the bigger draw, we asked, Radar’s one-stop shtick or their way around a kiddie script? “When you work with kids, getting the performance is critical,” Lombardi says. “They’re the most valuable and volatile part of your shoot. They’re the element that you have the least amount of control over, yet they’re the most important resource we have. You have to keep things geared toward their comfort level at all times. We work with directors who understand this, and Don does.
“The great thing about Radar is they give and give and give,” he continues. “They keep us involved throughout the process, and we walk projects through while they’re still in the conceptual phase, before we’ve even shown them to the client. They’ve shot tests for us to show us how things will look and they collaborate with us before the jobs are awarded. They’ve also helped us out on pitches, and have played a role in helping us keep existing business and pursue new business. It’s a great relationship.”
We asked Hoeg if he ever thought he’d end up as a noted kids director when he first started. “Actually, I didn’t,” he says, sounding surprised. He didn’t start working on kids’ advertising, but says that early on he had a client who, seeing him with his own kids (he’s got three), told him he’d be good at it. “I said that’d I’d love to do it, but back then I was directing lots of stuff for adult markets and work with visual effects.”
The studio worked on Kellogg’s in its early days, and as Hoeg recalls, “We parlayed one project into another, and then another. And then Lisa came in with her background in kids work, and when you combined that with our effects capabilities, people began to tell us that we had the makings of a strong kids reel.”
How does the studio’s one-stop structure help further its youth marketing work? In some surprising ways, says Hoeg, who notes that they often use their previz segments to run through the spot with the kids before the shoot. He finds it can help make the shoot go a bit easier, and maybe settle some nerves, too.
“Being on set can be somewhat daunting,” Hoeg notes. “It’s one thing to shoot a kid sitting on a sofa in a living room. It’s another to shoot him against green screen with tracking marks, on a rotational table, and have to explain to him or her what we’re doing. So the more information we can have beforehand, the better. Having the previz on the set lets us show them how it’s going to look really cool at the end. And they say, ‘I got it!’ They pick it up immediately, and they get all excited. Half the time they give us suggestions on how to improve it.”
This was a big lift (pardon the pun) on an Airheads spot he directed not that long ago in which a boy’s head blows up like a balloon from eating the candy. Eventually the balloon explodes, scattering a colorful goo all over a wooden fence, leaving the kid looking like he just walked out of a Jackson Pollack painting.
“We did our homework on that one and showed the agency how we thought it was going to look beforehand, so the client was really comfortable,” Hoeg explains. “But it was also easier for the kids when we were casting, because they could see where we were going with it. They were able to get into the concept and see how much fun it was.”
We asked Boyle for his take on what’s most important when approaching a kids’ spot and he was pretty straight and to-the-point. “I can sum it up in two words-casting, casting and casting,” he says with a laugh. “It helps that I really like working with kids. I enjoy the process and I find it really fun. And I try and make it fun for the kids, too. It’s important to keep the atmosphere loose, yet at the same time they need to know who’s in charge and that we’ve all got a job to do. So it’s important that they be able to listen and follow direction, and then we just lay down the ground rules up front.”
So what does the radar scope show for Radar? Both Hoeg and Masseur are encouraged by the trend they see in new talent, as evidenced by directors like Macon, who bring a DIY esthetic to how they like to work. “The younger people coming into the business today have more of a do-it-all mentality, which fits right in with where we’re at,: says Hoeg. “You take a director like Sam; he may not want to physically do every aspect of the production himself, but he wants to be involved with overseeing everything.”
Circling back to his original theme of a studio set up around creative people, Hoeg says that Radar looks for directors and artists “who not only complement the way we work, but who can take us into new markets.” They’ve found that with Macon, Boyle and Walter Robot, but there’s still more to be done. “What we’re looking for are people who above all have a fun, energetic quality to their work,” says Masseur. “That’s what Radar has always been about.”
Tags: 3D/CGI, Animation, Combo-Live&CG, Kids, Young+Fun
