With the male-targeted GRIT and the female-skewing ESCAPE already under its belt, Katz Broadcasting’s third network bridges the gender divide with the universal language of laughter. Its new digital linear network LAFF launched April 15 with a playful, lighthearted brand designed by the Atlanta-based agency Elevation.

LAFF marked the completion of a Katz branding hat trick for Elevation, which also worked on GRIT and ESCAPE. The first two times around, the agency assisted with the logo design of the networks as well, but for LAFF, Elevation was handed a ready-made mark and a tagline conceived by the network’s in-house team.

Part of Elevation’s challenge was to bring that logo to life in the ensuing graphics package. Fortunately, its boxy shape was “something we could play with and use,” said Stephen Cocks, Elevation’s creative director. “Our suggestion was to keep it flat and playful within the shape of the logo, to allow the letters to be able to bounce around within that.”

The only sticking point, Cocks continued, was the logo’s vibrant color scheme, which his team liked, but which also presented some unique challenges.

“When you’re dealing with a red logo, particularly on white, it’s often hard to find other colors that work well with it,” he said, “so we tried to branch out and create a color palette that would compliment that but at the same time give us some flexibility to keep this vibrant and moving.”

What his team came up with uses gentle hues of lavender, yellow and turquoise to delicately offset the baseline red, creating a surprising degree of warmth considering the logo’s loud crimson – a nice feeling for a network whose main movie selection consists of heartwarming rom-coms. Meanwhile, the package’s fast-moving type moves with an almost liquid grace through the backdrops, an elasticity that further accentuates the warm vibe.

The graphic design was only half of the equation. To make sure the new brand had plenty of content from the get-go, Cocks’ team also committed to supplying as many as seven 5-second IDs and just as many 10-second IDs, plus additional logo spots.

To conceptualize the idents, Elevation sent a call to its staff of 15 designers, writers and producers, asking them to conceive of as many goofy gags as they could involving people, objects, and people interacting with objects. The ideas that came back ranged from bad dancing (which would become prominently featured in the ensuing package) to throwing a small ball off screen only to have a 12-foot-diameter beach ball come bouncing back (that one didn’t make the cut).

Shooting the footage for the spots took four days. Working within both time and budget restraints, Elevation shot the prop-oriented gags that appear in the idents in-house, having a ball across two days of “rubber chickens falling, slow-mo, chattering teeth and that kind of stuff,” said Cocks.

For the second two days of shooting, the agency moved to a studio with a green screen, where it could bring people in for their funny contributions and lay in behind them seamless color schemes that fit the brand palette they had developed.

Elevation planned to exclusively hire improv comedy actors for the spots, from troupes around Atlanta.

They found “some hysterical people,” said Cocks, “who could really pull off some great facial expressions. But, he continued, many improvisers also happen to fall on the quirky side in terms of both personality and physical appearance, and LAFF, after seeing the casting reel, requested actors with a slightly more traditional/universal appearance. In the end, they settled for a blend of both types, which was probably for the best. Of course, comedic actors are needed in a comedy brand but few things can beat seeing an otherwise “normal”-looking person getting hit in the face with a dodgeball.

When it came time to film the actors, Elevation shot at 244 frames per second so that everything was in slow motion. Later, after selecting the funniest moments, it would mix frame-rate speeds to create moments of surprise and delight.

“They all have such a particular style of how they run and move, when you see it in slow motion and cut that together as a sequence, you come up with a whole new ID just with those four people,” said Cocks.

Though many of the moments were planned in advance, some also came from just letting the actors goof around.

“You try to do everything professionally,” Cocks continued, “but you get those moments when you’re dealing with funny people… It was hilarious. We did a lot of laughing, a lot of experimenting.

“My feeling is, the best way for people to remember your stuff is to make them smile,” continued Cocks. “Anything that makes you laugh or entertains you, people have a good feeling towards that.”

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