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For Curious Pictures’ Rohitash Rao,
It’s What’s Up Top That Counts
By Anthony Vagnoni
If your hair could be a metaphor for your personality, then Rohitash Rao’s coif gives you a pretty good idea of what he’s like.
 It’s kind of wild, kind of out there, kind of screwy—yet it works. Not quite dreads yet by no means kinky, Rao’s locks seem to embody a spirit of their own, a kind of freewheeling exuberance and joy that mirrors the personality of its 40-year bearer. A former agency art director turned writer/creative director for a cable TV network turned director of animated and live action videos, shorts and commercials, Rao is settling in to a niche as a go-to guy for mixed media work. In the process, he’s flourishing as a creative person—he’s published a book, he’s working on a sequel and he’s shopping around an animated TV series.
Could it be what’s on top that counts?
“The bigger Ro’s hair gets, the more creative he gets,” says Maggie Choo, Senior Digital Producer at Nike who worked with him at BBDO/L.A. years ago. “It suits him.”
Mary Knox, EP at Curious Pictures and the person who signed him to the company (back when he was half of the directing team Ugly Pictures), seems to agree. “Ro is a very special mix of conceptual thinking, technical know-how, extreme patience and a slightly twisted world view,” she says. “He can make his own stop-motion models, design 2D characters and direct live action. He is a truly modern director.”
As Knox suggests, Rao’s work runs the gamut from traditional stop-motion, as seen in pieces like “Hatch,” his short for the community-oriented web site meetup.com, to the bevy of live-action and animation spots he did for Nike’s “Be Transformed” campaign, created and produced by AKQA in San Francisco. (See “Jump Rope,” “Meteor,” “Bike” and “Punching Bag” here.) His work also includes a very wacked set of promos for the G4 videogame TV channel, as well as an equally racy stop-motion spot for Boost Mobile in which Mrs. Claus and a snowman are caught in a compromising position.
Rao started on his film career by building a self-financed spec reel while he was still working on the agency side. A graduate of the Art Center in Pasadena, his agency experience also includes, in addition to BBDO, stints at Larsen/Colby and Stein Robaire Helm in L.A. and freelance work at such shops as TBWA\Chiat\Day, Cliff Freeman & Partners, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, Ogilvy and Fallon.
 He also spent two-and-a-half years as creative director for on-air promos for the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy). “This was my film school,” Rao says. “It was like being in college, in that you had to do so much of the work yourself.” While there he was writing, directing and working on the edit for everything from TV show IDs and network interstitials to full-up broadcast commercials. While at Sci-Fi, Rao recalls, he frequently worked with The Mill in New York, where he says some of the artists urged him to go back and check out the classics of stop-motion cinema such as the work of the director Ray Harryhausen. As with his spec work, he approached the craft from a self-taught perspective, and worked on his own until he had two shorts—one of which was written by Eric Silver, now ECD at DDB in New York—that he felt confident enough to show to a friend, the stop-motion director PES.
“He liked them, and invited me to show them to some of his friends, one of whom was Bill Plympton,” Rao recalls. With their encouragement, he entered the shorts in various festivals, and “suddenly I was an animation director.” Around this time he also teamed up with a photographer's assistant he met in Richmond named Abe Spear, who wanted to be a DP. “He had access to a camera, and we were off and running,” Rao recalls.
The two formed Ugly Pictures, and collaborated on a range of funny and inspired spots for brands such as Crunch Fitness and Half.com. They also rocketed to viral fame with their "Album Wars" short, produced as an intro for an Advertising Week "Battle of the Bands" event in New York in 2007. The piece, which mashed up shots of various classic rock acts culled from album covers as they blew each other to smithereens, quickly generated three-quarters of a million online views and was covered by Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone and other pubs.
Throughout his career, Rao has often been able to tap into a wide network of friends and co-workers who’ve amiably crossed his path. His first real commercial directing job came from Court Crandall, co-founder of Ground Zero, with whom he’d worked at Stein Robaire, and his Nike “Be Transformed” work was done for Choo, with whom he’d worked at BBDO. Gary Rose, now EP at Go Film, was EP at Moxie Pictures when Rao was just launching his directing career, and helped him out by paying the lab costs for the spec pieces he’d shot.
 The success he’s enjoying now did not happen automatically, Rao recalls. After two years as a solo director with Moxie—during which time he proved to be a hard sell—he decided to take stock of where he was. “I took a break to re-think my strategy, and in the process realized I was struggling so hard to be the kind of director that everyone else was—namely, the subtle-comedy live action guy,” he recalls. “I always loved animation, and more specifically stop-motion, so I figured this was my chance to finally try it.”
On the recommendation of several EPs in the business, he sought out Curious Pictures, which eventually signed both him and Spear as a directing team. It didn’t hurt that one of their short films made it onto the Saatchi & Saatchi New Director’s Showcase at Cannes in 2005, the year they joined the company.
Once at Curious, more agency work came along, which allowed him to draw on his extensive background on the agency side. “The two biggest advantages it gives you is that you know how to concept and you know what the creatives are going through who’ve hired you,” he explains. “You've been there, you know they're fighting the good fight and they want you to shine, but they have to deal with their CDs and clients—so there’s is a complete understanding of where they're coming from when they say things like, ‘we have to spend more time on the product shot.’”
“The best thing about Ro is that in addition to his agency background, he’s extremely creative and he’s got this unique perspective on the world that could only come from him,” says Choo. “He’s very collaborative and easy to work with. I think he’s part of a new generation of directors who understand how tough it is in advertising right now and are totally willing to work with you to get you what you need.”
 Right now, Rao’s interest in experimenting and pushing boundaries is being more than satisfied. Last year he and a writing partner, Peter Nelson, published their first book, a Harper Collins kids title called “Herbert’s Wormhole” which he illustrated. A sequel is due out in 2011, and the two have an entirely new illustrated novel due out in 2012.
He’s also just getting rolling on a 22-episode animated series that will live both on TV and online, and is shopping around a concept for an animated TV series to be produced by Curious titled “Rancho Cucamonga,” inspired by what he calls his “true life stories of growing up Indian” in the California suburb of the same name. And there’s the animated version of his “Herbert’s Wormhole” book, to boot.
So has all this gone to his furry little head?
“The best thing that can happen to you is that you gain more and more confidence over the years, and this allows you to take more and more risks,” he says. “For me, it’s creating stuff that I’ve never tried before. Most recently it was a stop-motion piece I did for Amnesty International. It combined black and white photographs that I photocopied and mounted to cardboard, then set them up in layers like you would an old-school animation multi-plane. The dolls were designed to look like chiseled sculptures, and we cut out type and glued them to wire so they could animate out of the dolls’ mouths. I don’t think I’d dare try something like this a few years ago.”
Published March 25, 2010
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