Full of glittering reflective surfaces, churning machinery, and logos that swoop in to shake the earth upon impact, sports graphics tend toward the brash, bold and attention-getting.

But beneath much of the testosterone-fueled grandiosity lies nuance. Sports animations must manage to combine explosive and tidy, loud and meticulous. Designed for canvases that can be as big as stadium Jumbotrons, and for telecasts that have rapidly become the TV industry’s most important commodity, there is little room for error in sports graphics. The attention to detail must be as taut as an Aaron Rodgers spiral into the end zone.

Cake Studios is a master of such graphics. The Burbank, Calif.-based full-service creative house has churned out attention-grabbing graphics for the likes of Fox Sports, ESPN and the Denver Broncos. And yet Cake, despite working for some of the world’s biggest sports and entertainment brands, exudes a vibe of laid-back approachability. For instance, in place of proper head shots on the company’s About page, co-founders Jim Steinhaus (executive producer) and Mannix (creative director) have supplied an image of Cheech and Chong, caught in an expression of alarmed bemusement, as if to say, “Sure, stuff gets crazy. What can you do?”

Talking to Brief, Steinhaus exuded that laid-back charm as he discussed coming up through the ranks with Mannix as staffers with broadcast graphics pioneers Rezn8. Entering the workforce in the mid-‘90s, Steinhaus said he applied for an entry-level job with Rezn8 on a Thursday afternoon in January. The following Monday, the Northridge earthquake struck the San Fernando Valley, prompting Rezn8 to call immediately afterward and say, “‘You’re hired!’” remembered Steinhaus. “We need you to come in right away and help clean up the office.”

But while Steinhaus’ entry into television involved carrying machinery out of a broken building and delivering tapes to hastily adapted home offices, it quickly evolved into a viable career. Over 16 years with Rezn8, he leveraged the grunt work into assistant producer gigs, producer gigs and finally became executive producer for the company. Along the way he befriended his coworker Mannix, a motion graphics wiz with a background in fine art. When Mannix left Rezn8 to pursue freelance opportunities, he and Steinhaus started talking about branching out with their own business.

It was 2008ish and the industry was changing rapidly, both in terms of pricing and in terms of how much work could be done. The accelerating speed and power of computers was prompting greater workloads for less money and as a result, large, well-entrenched graphics studios were having a hard time competing against what Steinhaus called “garage outfits.”

“Anybody with a garage and a computer could sit there in their underwear and start banging out broadcast graphics,” he said, “so you really had to adapt how you did your work and how you pushed your work through and how you could streamline so you’re cranking out a lot of work in the face of budgets that were becoming less robust and time frames that were becoming tighter.”

Steinhaus and Mannix saw an opportunity to “do really great stuff and get it done quicker, add our own render farm, and really start to push that design envelope as much as possible. That’s the trend we saw and that’s the benefit we saw – starting small and growing it the way we wanted to grow it and be part of that trend as it became more and more commonplace.”

They formed Cake in 2009 and have been going strong ever since. A strategic alliance with experiential graphics suppliers Reality Check Systems provided a boon early on, as Cake teamed with the Vzrt platform experts to supplement their clients’ real-time surveys, tickers and other dynamic elements with design expertise. That way, said Steinhaus, “the client ends up getting an all-in-one delivery that covers all their broadcast needs, from the openings down to the promos, to the stats being displayed for the broadcast.”

In 2012, Cake committed to Cinema 4D as its primary software. “There are people who say that if you want to do modeling, core geometry, a robot, etc., that Maya is what you should use,” Steinhaus said of the decision. “But when you start to build a scene and you’re animating a camera through it, Cinema 4D is a very easy piece of software to use. It’s very intuitive.”

Cake also continued to beef up its infrastructure and rendering capabilities, eventually building a pipeline powerful enough to take on Jumbotron projects for clients like the Denver Broncos and Philadelphia Eagles. Of designing graphics for screens that can stretch across four or five sections of stadium seats, Steinhaus said that “the canvas itself is great, because you can do so many cool things with such a large area. You can push those details and environments a lot farther. It’s a chance to expand what we’re doing with the design and the visual language of the package, to continue to add cool details in there, which helps push that experience over the top for the fan.”

Though sports has clearly defined their path to success, Cake has designed graphics for non-sports clients as well, showing their flexibility in work for shows like The Insider (formerly omg! Insider) and The Price is Right. In 2015, the company even got to use its high-octane sports style in the pursuit of comedy, for Key & Peele’s Super Bowl Special.

Working with the popular Comedy Central show on something lampooning Cake’s bread and butter was “pretty fun,” said Steinhaus. “It was an anything goes scenario… you want helicopters in there, you want explosions, you want this big robot with this phallic imagery. They were like, ‘just give us everything.’ There were no bad idea. Everything imaginable in the big huge sports graphics world was thrown in there. Nothing was off limits.”

It was a project that let Cake show off the full scope of its expertise while also showcasing a sense of humor that might not be as evident in its other work, but is another aspect of the studio’s amiable charm.

“We take our work seriously but we intend for it to be loose and collaborative and enjoyable at the same time,” said Steinhaus. “We’ll do graphics for big corporations but we’re still two guys running the company and you can call our mobile phones any time of day… we pride ourselves on that.”

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