The Lifelong Friendship Society Keeps Making Friends
This Brooklyn, New York-based design and production boutique, which is expanding into live action, keeps winning over creatives.
The Lifelong Friendship Society Keeps Making Friends
This Brooklyn, New York-based design and production boutique, expanding into live action, keeps winning over creatives.
By Anthony Vagnoni
Billy Strayhorn wrote the now-famous jazz number "Take the A Train" back in 1939. The signature tune of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, it came to embody the creative spark and sizzle that was going on up in Harlem at the time. You'll note that he didn't call it "Take the L Train."
One of the more overlooked of Manhattan's subway lines, the L seems to be finally getting its due. It bisects the city across 14th Street, then crosses under the East River into the hip, happening and now borough of Brooklyn -- home to Dumbo, Williamsburg, shows like HBO's "Bored to Death" and the offices of The Lifelong Friendship Society (TLFS).
If you're not familiar with the Friends, don't bother Googling them; they're not an alt rock band, an improv comedy troupe or some anarchist cult bent on overthrowing Wall Street. Rather, they're a boutique design and production studio that's quietly making a name for itself in the areas of commercials and broadcast promos.
The studio's roster of capabilities runs the gamut from live action to CG animation to visual effects and motion graphics. Their work includes everything from graphic treatments seen in live action spots produced by other shops to full-up production that covers just about everything from concept to completion, minus the music and sound. The list of projects they've worked on is similarly eclectic, from social cause-oriented Starbucks ads to wacky Burger King spots from the Crispin era to TV show IDs and opening title sequences.
The studio was formed in 2004 by Jason Jones and Travis Spangler, who are Designer / Directors and who direct most of TLFS's live action work. In 2007 they brought on an additional partner, Dan Sormani, who holds the title of Executive Producer.
Spangler and Jones took various career paths in motion graphics and design before meeting in the promotion department at VH-1. Sormani's career began on the agency side, where he was a producer at shops such as Lowe & Partners and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. He later transitioned into production at Brand New School and Stardust, where he was introduced to the world of motion graphics and visual effects while working on commercials, web videos and music videos.
Rounding out the Lifelong Friendship team are Designer/Creative Director Kaori Sohma, a native of Japan by way of North Carolina who came to New York to attend the Parsons School of Design, and Natalie Croker, an Aussie native who heads up business development, marketing and representation.
With Jones and Spangler coming out of the broadcast promotion world and Sormani's roots being in advertising, it makes sense that the studio is working steadily in both fields. Right now, says Sormani, the bulk of their work is in advertising, but like any good design-driven shop, they handle all sorts of things.
For example, they helped design a mascot for a pro-bono project BBDO New York was working on - it's an actual physical mascot, like the kind you see wearing costumes and cavorting in the stands at baseball games. They also did a nifty animated opening for a talk that Mark Tutssel, Leo Burnett's Worldwide Creative Director, gave in Cannes last year.
Yet most of TLFS's reel contains more traditional production and design for advertising. It includes things like a campaign they produced for the Denver agency Cactus, a lively series of anti-smoking PSAs for Colorado State Tobacco Education fund that uses bright backgrounds, live action shots and cut out animation to promote young people sharing messages about tobacco use (check out "Refreshing" and "Species").
A recent and notable TLFS job was a visually-driven spot they produced earlier this year for CTIA, the wireless communications trade group, which positions wireless devices and services as ways for the US, with more people working remotely, to cut down on energy consumption. Created by the Washington, D.C.-based agency GMMB, "Wireless" features a seamless mix of live action, visual effects, graphics and editorial, all performed at TLFS.
The studio has also collaborated on graphics, animation, titles and effects for a variety of spots, including work for the National Basketball Association for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners that features live action work from Biscuit Filmworks. They also provided neat, retro-styled graphics for a Coldstone Creamery spot from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York produced by Epoch Films. Other TLFS work is pure animation and design - for example, Starbucks' "Grassroots Movement" is an all-animated spot produced for BBDO that taps graphics and on-screen type to promote volunteerism and community involvement.
Paul Caiozzo, a former Creative Director at Agency 215 and, before that, Crispin Porter, has worked with TLFS on a number of projects and considers himself a fan. He describes the studio as "a group of talented people with good taste who can do anything," he says. "Once you find people like this, you give them the chance to do things beyond what they've done before, or what they're known for. TLFS has always risen to whatever challenge we've thrown at them. They're strongest when there's a sense of design to the work, along with a slightly off-kilter look and feel that needs to be brought to life in a non-jokey way. They have excellent restrained taste."
One agency TLFS has worked with a number of times is Crispin; in addition to many BK spots, they've also designed end tags and other graphic elements for two highly satirical ads for the Alliance for Climate Protection, an environmental group that seeks to counter the concept of 'clean coal' by demonstrating just how clean it really is. The spots, titled "Air Freshener" and "Laundry," were directed by the Coen Brothers and feature an unctuous spokesperson who messes things up with coal dust.
TLFS also teamed with the agency on work for Microsoft; in "Kylie Good News," shot by the directing team Dayton/Faris, an incredibly adorable little girl shows off what she can do on her dad's new PC. (Hint - it involves cartoon unicorns and kittens.)
Broadcast promotion work from the studio includes a promo for CBS' Grammy Awards telecast earlier this year in which Radiohead's Thom Yorke is interviewed off-camera about why he got into music. As he speaks, the words he's saying appear on-screen in floating bits of type, which eventually come together to form an illustration of Yorke himself.
And then there's the guy made up like a dog with that bone in his mouth. It's an unnerving image from one of the studio's more 'out there' campaigns, this one for a product from a feisty little company called Help Remedies that offers consumers what are essentially stripped-down health aids. Its sleep product is called Help I Can't Sleep, and it was launched with a TV campaign that Caiozzo worked on at Agency 215 that features odd and unsettling dream sequences experienced by people who are having trouble nodding off.
TLFS did all the visual effects and graphics for the multi-spot campaign, which features a sixty-second commercial directed by Geordie Stephens of Tool of North America (titled "Balding," it features very creepy long-haired guys cast adrift in a rowboat), as well as two spots entirely produced at Lifelong Friendship Society, one of which is "Chew Toy." In that spot, the poor guy who's having trouble drifting off dreams he's a chew toy that gets chewed by a puppy, except the pooch is played by a guy who's covered in body paint rather than wearing a costume.
"We collaborated very closely with Jason and the entire TLFS crew on this campaign," Caiozzo notes. We've worked on so many projects together that the lines between creative and director and graphics house are all blurred. But my partner and I looked to them for their excellent visual execution, and to be able to bring our ideas to life in ways we'd not imagined."
The ability to help creative in this way was one of the factors that motivated Jones and Spangler to open the studio in the first place. Jones says that he and Spangler were interested in working on a wider range of brands and in telling different kinds of stories.
"We were there for the network's re-branding," Jones says, "and they gave us free reign then to do lots of promo and ID work." Adds Spangler, "We wanted to apply what we learned to more commercial projects in other categories." He points out that broadcast promotion is a great field to work in, but it lives by different rules - the schedule of when work has to be delivered is often looser, as are the creative strictures. "They're their own client," he says, "which means you can often be a lot freer to experiment."
The studio has made the transition from promos to ads rather nicely, as their commercials reel attests. Where they're going, it seems, is finally taking all the elements of what they do – effects, CG, design, motion graphics, animation, live action, etc. – and tying them up into one package, as they did on the CTIA spot. That project was directed by Troy Kooper, whom the Friends brought in for the project. (He's since joined their roster.) It's part of their measured expansion plans, they say, which entails bringing in outside directors when the project is right for it. "It's about exploring options and building relationships," says Croker.
"As we move more into live action, we're proceeding carefully," adds Sormani. "We're known for a particular kind of work, but we really enjoy taking on the entire project and being able to influence the overall look and feel of a spot. This is about not limiting ourselves creatively to what we can contribute, since we have all the tools at our disposal."
This, however, has lead to a discussion among the Society as to how best to define themselves in an ever-evolving marketplace for production and design services. "We're still sorting out what this shift means for us as a company," says Sormani. "When we look at what we do and how we do it, we see ourselves as being part of a different world."
It's no longer a simple statement to say that this shop does visual effects and this one does production, he suggests; indeed, the shifting boundaries are even extending to the agency / production company relationship itself.
"We now have agencies doing what we do, and in some respects we can do what agencies do," Sormani continues. "The lines between how and where work is conceived, approved and produced have more than blurred. And in the midst of this, you need to keep an eye on how you grow as a company and how you sustain yourself."
That said, the Lifelong Friends expect that their multi-disciplinary and design-driven approach won't change, regardless of how they work, the kind of techniques they employ and where their work is being seen. "You can't lose sight of where you came from," Spangler sums up, "and where your roots are."
Published 20 October, 2011
Membership
