Trollbäck + Company: Wall of Vision
Rhythm and Design
Learning to work with moving images was initially a challenge, Trollbäck admits. “But then I started to realize that it’s all about rhythm — it’s a choreography of images through time. Suddenly it all came together with my lifelong love for music, and I became fascinated by working in motion.”
Music and motion have a lot in common, he notes: “When people ask me how to become a great motion designer or filmmaker, I always say, ‘Be a DJ for a while.’ It’s very much about communication. Whenever you put on the next record, you’re thinking, ‘Are they with me or not?’ It’s been very helpful when it comes to working with motion, which is essentially storytelling.”
In 1999, Trollbäck founded Trollbäck + Company with his wife, Lisa Trollbäck. “There were five of us at the beginning,” he says. “We started with graphics for TV commercials, then moved into full commercials, mostly involving graphic animations. Then we began to get phone calls from television networks, asking if we could help them rebrand.”
The firm has worked with an alphabet soup of networks, including AMC, CBS, CNN, Court TV, HBO, Nickelodeon, TCM, and TNT. In addition to branding and advertising work, they’ve created titles for such films as A Beautiful Mind, Capote, and Monsoon Wedding.
Today, Trollbäck shares visual direction duties for the 22-person studio with fellow Creative Director Joe Wright. “He’s spectacular,” says Trollbäck. “We basically do the same thing, except that Joe has been shooting a lot of live action in the last couple of years.”
Macs and More Macs
Since the beginning, Macs have been central to T+Co’s work. The studio currently has about 40 Macs, plus an Apple Xserve G5 and 3TB Xserve RAID.
“We bought another eight Macs just to use as a render cluster for the IAC project,” Trollbäck says. “We have ten freelancers here right now, and when we don’t have freelancers, we use those machines as render farms.”
The studio relies on a variety of design and motion applications. “We use all the basic tools that come with OS X, like Preview and QuickTime,” says Trollbäck. “We use iPhoto to handle our photographs, Final Cut Pro for editing, Illustrator and Photoshop for storyboards, and After Effects or Maya for animation.”
Trollbäck remembers a few “dark years” at the beginning of the decade when the company used PCs for their 3D work. “I felt almost like something broke inside me, that my company was going to have a PC!” he says. “But then the Mac came back and became as fast as the PC, and then faster. We were so happy to get rid of those PCs! I think we still have one $300 PC here for the accounting person, but we’re going to lose that too.”
The strength of the Mac is its simplicity, he observes. “Macs are completely modular and flexible — if we need a new printer, we just buy one and hook it up to the network. The Mac does exactly what I want it to do. It takes things that might seem extremely complicated and makes them understandable to anybody. And the software and hardware keep getting smarter and better-looking, which is an inspiration for anyone who works in a creative field. Apple cares about how things work, and also how they look. Since I’m a designer, I want everything to be aesthetically pleasing, because I see no reason why it shouldn’t be.”
Timeless Design
Though Trollbäck + Company is based in New York, its staff is primarily European. “I’m Swedish,” says Trollbäck. “Joe Wright, the other creative director, is British. We have Swiss people, Turkish people, Finnish, Canadian, and Japanese people. The Americans are a minority — I think we have five.”
Their design approach might be described as fundamentally European as well. “We do things that are clean and uncluttered,” Trollbäck says. “We don’t do a lot of filigrees and whatever else is hip right now. I think a lot of our work will stand the test of time, because there’s nothing trendy about it. When we’re good, we just do beautiful stuff, or powerful or shocking stuff. A lot of motion graphics these days don’t have a purpose — they’re done just because they look cool. But things that merely look cool wear out very quickly.”
Whatever images Trollbäck and his colleagues choose, they must mean something. And whatever the medium, the studio aims to communicate using straightforward, timeless visuals.
“We’re very referential in our work,” he says. “It also needs to be transformative in some way. I always try to relate to different human emotions — but the reference can be abstract, like when you’re driving your car and there’s light on the windshield, and the lampposts create a rhythm in the light as you drive past. Or how you feel when you’re lying flat on your back, looking up at trees. We always try to have something unexpected or wonderful happen. That’s when I feel happy about what we’re doing.”
