October 2, 2007

Tastes Like Chicken
BAD Studio was once again tapped by Adult Swim to design DVD packaging, menus and an online advertising for the Emmy Award-winning Robot Chicken. Targeted to adult males15-40, the show is a wild ride of traditional stop motion animation that skewers celebrity and pop culture.

"Working closely with Adult Swim's internal creative department always results in great work," says Scott Banks, President of BAD Studio. "Whether it's merely a production project or a full-blown, no holds-barred design project, their high standards allow us to do what we do best."

DVD Packaging and Menu Design
Everything started with a few files set up by Adult Swim's art directors and BAD Studio took things from there.

"Our goal was to capture the eclectic nature and pop culture references of the show," recounts Banks. "The simple outside of the package, opens to an over the top assault of color. The menu design has almost a hand colored photograph look from the world of music videos and highly stylized films. The discs are a reinterpretation of old TV test patterns which are a common theme throughout the show."

Though understated, the packaging uses several specialty printing techniques - dull and gloss UV coatings and red metallic foil. The simplicity of the outer package, along with these special printing techniques help it stand out on a typically busy store shelf.

For the DVD menus, a combination of hi-res studio photography for the puppets was combined with screen grabs of backgrounds and specially created textures to give the menus a gritty feel.

"We watched every episode pulling screen grabs for possible use on the project." says Banks. "Then we moved on to creating specialty textures by hand." Ink roller textures, folded paper, weathered cardboard and stained papers were made, collected and scanned. The final art was compiled in Photoshop, and delivered to Turner studios for programming.

"it's a labor of love. When you're a fan, you have your favorites, but you need to let all that go and work within the project's constraints. The trick is to do it in a way that still compelling and original."

Online Animated Flash Ad Campaign
The online ad campaign presented its own set of challenges. Though Flash is a powerful tool for adding video content to web sites, limitations in file size for online ads make it nearly impossible to use video content for that format. A workaround needed to be found.

"Instead of using straight video, which uses about 15 frames per second for the web, we built an animated jpeg using every tenth frame," says Banks "In the end we had with better image quality and a smaller file size."

Once the animation issue was solved, the ad was produced in 2 versions and 12 sizes to run on over 20 different web sites.

To see more of BAD Studios work go to www.badstudio.com. To contact BAD Studio email Scott Banks at scott@badgraphics.com or call 404-881-1977