Stardust Studios:
Banking on Imagination
Jake Banks has no patience for design that simply makes things pretty or even particularly precise. In the award-winning body of work that Mac-based Stardust Studios has created under Banks’s direction, spring colors sprout through a black-and-white winter. Cars become birds. Birds become people. People paint flowers into air.
With Banks’s enthusiasm and progressive sense of invention, it hasn’t taken long for this young bicoastal company — Banks launched Stardust in 2003 — to attract clients like Nike, Honda, BMW, Nokia, and Bud Light.
Perhaps that’s because unlike many major agencies, Stardust Studios provides a one-stop shop in innovative motion design, animation, visual effects, and live-action production for commercial, on-air, music video, and in-store presentations.
Scrappy Shop
“We definitely have a fresh look and feel for the commercial, video, and animation world,” Banks says of Stardust’s work. “But we’re also a very diverse — some would say, scrappy — shop. And everyone — designers and animators in both of our offices — contributes to the finished product. Where these big shops have tiers and tiers of people focused on something specific and get bogged down by their infrastructures, we can win a huge campaign with just two artists and a Mac.”
Stardust’s scrappiness may be one of the reasons it succeeds in an environment crowded with visual effects companies, motion graphics companies, and live action companies. The versatile shop can handle any style — 3D, flat, filmic — but puts its own twist on the work.
New School
“I don’t mean to sound cocky,” Banks says with a note of apology in his voice, “but I think the production world is going to go to a business model like ours where you can do editorial, live action, animation, visual effects, print, web, maybe even sound design, all in one place.
“Traditionally, agencies go to about five different facilities just to do one spot. That’s kind of an old-school approach. For instance, one of the dogmas with ad agency work is: ‘You have to finish on a Flame.’ As we all know, the Flame is like riding a dying horse. We can do everything on our Macs. That’s the new-school way of doing it. You don’t need all these old, slow machines that do just one thing. Clients will catch on sooner rather than later. Why go to all these different facilities when you can just go to one where all these great ideas and talented people are under one roof?”
“Culturebloom”
Banks launched Stardust out of his apartment. But it wasn’t long before the shop built a portfolio impressive enough to become the next big thing.
When MAC Corporate asked Stardust Studios to pitch a campaign for an artistic in-store video and CD showcasing the spring color collection for MAC Cosmetics, the company provided the briefest of instructions: Spring and “Culturebloom.”
Stardust went to town. Literally. Shooting on 35mm film, Stardust’s creative team, led by L.A. design director Brad Tucker and executive producer Eileen Doherty, asked MAC models, people from New York’s fashion industry, even people off the street in Manhattan, including owners of a tattoo shop: What does Spring mean to you?
After Stardust’s Tony Hall cut and assembled the mini-interviews in Final Cut Pro, animation artists Sandy Chang, Magnus Hierta, and Sam Sparks used After Effects to accentuate the subjects’ faces with elegant swirls, tendrils, and splashes of MAC Cosmetics spring colors.
“We did these style frames all about color, flowers, tactile things, and patterns to give an overall look and feel to the video,” Banks says. Used internationally, the 4:20 showpiece titled “Culturebloom” paints a refreshing portrait of spring breaking through the lifelessness of winter.
“Step into Blue”
The project that put Stardust on the map — ”Step into Blue” for Bombay Sapphire — shows off Stardust’s willingness to push the limits of imagination and Macs.
Banks served as creative director, art director, director, and editor for the Dada-esque montage, which earned a BDA World Gold Award in the competitive commercial category.
The 60-second spot follows a woman, often deconstructed, wandering through an ever-shifting landscape of images that include a silver subway car pulled apart by the beauty and color of nature, trailing vines, crystal jellyfish, a forest reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream,” and birds with safety pins or potato peelers for feathers.
