Sarofsky Motion Design Sabbatical
Situation: I enrolled in the Motion Media and Game Design programs at the Savannah College of Art & Design when things slowed down (at work, at least) during the 2020 pandemic. I ended up meeting the extremely talented Sarofsky founder, Erin Sarofsky, at SCAD’s first ever 100% remote COMOTION festival. A couple months later, I was offered an internship opportunity to come see how things work at Sarofsky and contribute to projects I don’t normally see at Boeing.
Approach: After getting the sabbatical approved at work, I jumped in at Sarofsky, feeling like I just started my career all over again. I’m one of the few “elder millennials” that will actually know what it feels like to “intern” on an all-remote team. I had a chance to support a number of pitches for film titles to commercials. One of of my favorite projects was working on style frames for a show that is actually out now, Citadel.
For those who don’t know, studios will pitch several “rough” ideas for a title sequence early on to determine the interests of their clients, without spending a fortune on creating final and polished frames. Sarofsky asked me, along with a few other artists, to come up with some ideas for the pitch. The other artists had so much more going on with their shots…3D terrains, Fake User Interfaces, chromatic aberration for days …all the cool stuff you’d expect from modern motion designers. After watching recordings of a few early meetings with the show’s production team and reading through A LOT of notes, I went a different direction. Recognizing the show’s theme of questioning some of history’s biggest moments, I chose to pursue this montage of revisited moments in time, but with an altered/distorted lens.
I ended up working on several projects like this under the creative leadership of Duarte Elvas, who challenged me to be more of a clever and considerate designer.
Outcome: My frames weren’t always the prettiest, but they got the job done to help the team sell my ideas to their clients. I was told my concept was actually selected for that Citadel project, too! Here’s what Erin had to say about working with me.
He thinks about the team and how he can contribute across the board, not just about his specific goal or task. In a studio environment you can easily see the value of having a person like that around. And, when his booking was over, people went out of their way to remark about how he was missed.
Erin Sarofsky
Responsibilities: Graphic Design, Motion Design, making proposal-ready style frames and motion tests
Technology Used: Cinema 4D, Redshift, Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop
This was a fun project Sarofsky makes all the newbies complete when they join. I got asked to introduce part of myself to Saroksky’s Instagram followers. Mountain biking was a big deal to me in the middle of the pandemic and I was also learning 3D animation. So naturally, I combined the two and made everything from scratch in Cinema 4D.
For the Citadel piece, my time ended before the team got into production, but I was really excited to see that even my small contributions were able to persist throughout the creative process. The allusion and connection to historical events is still there and it looks like the type treatment didn’t change too much either! Of course, like everything they do, Sarofsky made a beautiful final product and I’m super proud that I was able to work with them, even for a short while.