When Brett Richards was looking for the perfect name for his fledgling agency in 2006, the veteran VFX and broadcast design pro reached back to his teenage years for inspiration.

Brokendoll was the name of a company he founded with his best friend when he was 18 in his native Australia, and “it reminded me of that innocence and excitement we had for the technology and the world,” Richards said. “That passion for motion graphics design and new technology was the seed for Brokendoll.”

Eight years later, the Stockholm-based agency has evolved from a shop that focuses on pure motion graphics to one that has a track record of also delivering live-action work and projects that combine live graphics and motion graphics in new ways.

Richards and his fellow Brokendoll directors, Markus Lundqvist, Emnet Mulugeta, and Roi Sabarov, all used to be “pure design guys” as he puts it, and Brokendoll has latched on to that collective pedigree as its big selling point to the industry: design-driven storytelling with a unique visual flair.

“We try to work conceptually when we can, and think of the big idea as much as possible and take that as a starting point,” Richards said.

The company recently expanded its footprint to span both sides of the Atlantic, with Mulugeta opening Brokendoll’s new offices in Los Angeles.

The four Brokendoll directors tap into a network of creative agencies across Sweden for clients that include Showtime, DisneyXD, Canal+‘s C More, and Viasat, TV12, and TV4.

Among their latest projects is a complete campaign for the Swedish Hockey League that included main trailers, game trailers, and custom playoffs graphics.

Brokendoll set out to create a campaign that felt intimate and pretty to look at, while still emphasizing how hard the players work and how hard they train. Hockey being hockey, they wanted to show off the rivalries on the ice, too.

“We wanted to get inside their motivation, and be visually striking,” Richard said. “Through their whole campaign there is this tension between the aesthetic and the sense of realism.”

With hockey season winding down, Brokendoll is ramping up for the launch promo for Sweden’s soccer leagues, including recent filming with some of the country’s biggest stars.

When Sweden’s TV12 rebranded from an all-sports network to one that features a mixture of sports and lifestyle content, Brokendoll needed to come up with an on-air identity that encapsulated a fairly diverse programming slate.

“We had to find a unique way of presenting this idea of one channel to the audience,” Richards said.

Their solution merges movement and design in identifiers that simultaneously acknowledge both sides of the TV12 house without hitting the viewers over the head with the message.

On a somewhat larger scale, 200 million viewers around the world got a taste of Brokendoll’s style during the 2013 Eurovision competition, when Sweden served as the host nation.

For the uninitiated: Eurovision is a one-of-a-kind singing competition that blends cheesy pop, high camp, and a healthy amount of national pride. Each country on the continent sends one act to represent them, there’s a rather complicated voting structure, the U.K. usually winds up somewhere near the bottom, everyone loves to hate it, and most winners rapidly fade into obscurity (ABBA was a notable exception). But everyone watches. Once again: 200. Million. Viewers.

Brokendoll crafted a complete broadcast identity and on-air graphics package for the 2013 competition that made prominent use of the competition’s butterfly logo.

They took the flat, 2D logo and designed 40 unique butterflies that represented the flags of the competing nations, which would move throughout the broadcast and promos. Brokendoll worked with live animation studio SWISS on final touches, and partnered with Camp David for the live action elements.

Up next for Richards: a speaking slot at the 2015 PromaxBDA Europe Conference in Berlin where he’ll be discussing the best ways to effectively communicate with creatives.

“The quality of work that ends up on our screen is defined by the quality of communication with our clients,” Richards said.

Tags:


  Save as PDF