Long before founding the brand development and design agency Elevation, the company’s principal and creative director Stephen Cocks was just another teenager in South Africa obsessed with Star Wars. He had already been nurturing an affinity for sculpture and modeling, but George Lucas’ seminal film made him want to evolve his interest toward animation and special effects. So he sent his high-school scores and portfolio to art schools in America, and one of them took him in: the Atlanta College of Art, which is now the revered Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).

Cocks had never been out of South Africa before, but at 18 he was on his way to live and learn in Atlanta. He had a scholarship for the first year, but after that he was on his own. Fortunately, at a time when digital media was a glint in the eye for most graphics programs, a local company was making its first foray into 3D animation, and Cocks procured an internship with them. He couldn’t study the craft at the school in which he was enrolled, but he could pick it up by actually doing it out in the real world.

“I remember my video professor from school coming and taking a look at the studio I was working at,” Cocks said, “and he walked over to the vector waveform scopes and said, ‘What are these?’”

Cocks’ internship lead to a job, which meant that by his sophomore year he was rolling—working professionally in the field he loved to fund his schooling for it.

“I loved 3D animation and what you were able to do with that,” he said. “I think what I should have done after school gone out to California, because that’s where it was really happening.”

But Cocks didn’t move to LA. He stayed in Atlanta and started a small 3D company, “literally creating graphics from something as simple as a graphic background with bullet points on it because you couldn’t do that yet with any kind of editorial software.”

Eventually, Cocks bought the visual effects suite Flint because he couldn’t afford its more sophisticated sibling, Flame. When his capabilities dramatically improved and the work followed, he upgraded to Flame. Married now with three kids, Cocks still resides in Atlanta, and his company Elevation handles, among other things, between 40 and 45 show packages per year.

It’s a cliché to compare a company’s staff to a family, but at Elevation, the shoe fits. Cocks’ wife Ellen, a nutritional expert who also helps with the bookkeeping, takes pride in making sure both staff and clients are well-stocked with snacks, drinks and advice. The mom-and-pop vibe is enhanced by Cocks’ tendency to hire full-time staffers only after significant vetting at the freelance level to make sure they get along with the rest of the tightly-knit team. Everyone gets along so well, they prefer eating lunch together in the office to going out, just hanging out together and watching TV or playing video games.

“They’re all into Comic-Con and Dragon-Con,” too, Cocks said. “Basically we’re a big bunch of nerds but we have a lot of fun.”

The family-of-nerds vibe is reflected in significant amounts of work for clients such as Disney, Cartoon Network and ABC Family. Recently, Elevation completed a large digital project for Zing Toys and its product known as StikBot. Billed as “the world’s first social media toy,” StikBot is essentially a little plastic man with suction cups for hands and feet. He comes with an app kids can download, which lets them then shoot stop-motion videos with the flexible figurine and share them with the world. Elevation created a social media campaign for StikBot, composed of several stop-motion episodic videos starring the toy, and a stop-motion tie-in with the character on Cartoon Network.

But while a project like StikBot showcases Elevation’s affinity for charming children and families, it hardly cracks the surface of the company’s capabilities. Averaging between 40 and 45 show packages over the last few years, Elevation has worked with subjects ranging from cooking to weight loss, and everything in between.

“If I was to put up a page of networks we’ve either directly worked with or worked with through a production company, it would pretty much cover almost every network,” said Cocks. Clients include CNN, who has been a repeat customer with the company since its inception; Katz Broadcasting, for whom Elevation has rebranded three separate channels; and the Cooking Channel, to which Elevation supplied a refresh that was, in Cocks’ mind, one of Elevation’s most satisfying gigs.

Beginning with a graphics package for Cooking Channel’s show, Rev Run’s Sunday Supper, Elevation created the clean, bold and effective blend of movement, color and hip-hop sound seen above. Handled with a modest budget in about two weeks, the delivery and execution was “a pretty standard handover,” Cocks said. But then, “about a month later we get a call from Cooking… and they said, ‘hey, we’d like you guys to do the refresh and we’re not even bidding it out, and the reason we’re not is because when we polled internally, everyone loved the Rev Run package, and the movement and dynamics you guys brought to that package. It was a great start to a package – not having to bid is always awesome – but we also worked with a really nice group over there… and we just got to have so much fun playing with color and playing with movement.”

Another piece of what has become a hugely diverse reel, the Cooking Channel refresh reflects an overriding culture at Elevation that “has always been, ‘we’re artists all working together,’” said Cocks. “My background has been in the trenches and as an artist, the worst thing is having a client that’s not happy, feeling like you have something you’ve spent a lot of time on and it’s missed the mark. I’ve surrounded myself with people who feel the same way.”

People like Dianne Frisbee, Elevation’s art director and frequently a thoughtful counterbalance to Cocks’ tendency toward being “an impulse-idea guy. I can spout off three or four ideas really quickly and come up with a really quick solution. Why I love working with Dianne is, she always digs deeper. She’ll start looking at other things that are out here and really start to analyze the mood and the characters and the design approach to something.”

And people like David Hendrix, “one of those multitalented people,” said Cocks, “who composes music and is an avid drummer and guitar player” in addition to serving as Elevation’s assistant creative director. Working on a recent music-oriented sizzle reel for NBCUniversal Hispanic Group, Hendrix brought his entire skill set to the table. He designed the audio side of the two-minute video first, blending pop songs so seamlessly it sounds like one track is driving the entire thing when really it’s several, then went outside the scope of the project by producing a fresh array of graphics involving DJ lights and turntables.

Cocks relishes “giving people like David that opportunity to make something they’re really proud of,” he said. As a graphics artist himself who worked his way up from the bottom, he is keenly attuned to what his staff goes through on projects, and how he can make it better. Elevation offers a generous vacation package by American standards and has a strict overtime policy in place for when hours get long, as they inevitably do.

“Artists are incredibly sensitive, creative people, and if you work them to death they lose that,” Cocks said, “and you lose the most valuable part of why you hired people, which is for that enthusiasm and that spark.”

The industry, Cocks said, changed drastically in 2008 with the financial crisis. These days, he said, “I think we are doing double the amount of work than we were doing then in the same space of time, with the same staff. Budgets have come down and expectations have gone up. That’s the nature of technology – we’re able to produce so much more work so much faster. The demand for content is there and it’s pushing that. In this industry you either evolve or die. You have to make sure you’re providing a good product within that. I‘ve added people strategically who can handle that kind of work load.”

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