Industry Spotlight: Gentleman Scholar

Motion Design 27/06/2019 3 min read

For our latest installment of Industry Spotlight, we are going to take a look at Gentleman Scholar, the cutting edge, multimedia production company based in Los Angeles.

Gentleman Scholar has seen a quick rise to notoriety being as young as they are. The company was started in 2010 by William Campbell and Will Johnson. They’ve since gained enough work in commercials, music videos, movie titles, and the like to warrant the opening of a New York office earlier this year.

It’s no surprise either, the work Gentleman Scholar puts out is some of the best around these days. They are equally comfortable with live-action as they are with animation, something many studios have a hard time pulling off.

Let’s start with this beautiful and seemingly simple live-action spot for Clorox. At its core, it’s just a series of shots with hands cleaning messes. But the team at Gentleman Scholar covered every last detail to make this spot enjoyable to watch over and over.

They started by designing lovely type layouts that they then turned into “beautiful messes” with the help of food stylist Maelle De Schutter. Then they used somewhat minimalist set dressing to outline exactly how each scene comes to being, making it fun to go back and watch several times as you piece the stories together.

Now, let’s take a look at the other side of the coin, with this fully animated spot done for Oreo called “Wonder Vault.” Here, the team led by Campbell and Johnson created an entire 3D world where magical things happened fueled by new Oreo flavors.

They chose to build a look around a painted illustration style, but then they turned it on its head by building it out in 3D. The result is something that feels warm and handmade while still having the dazzle and wonder of 3D.

For this Truvia spot that aims to explain “The Story of Truvia” GS mixed elements of live-action with quirky 2D design to build a fun and lighthearted explanation video rooted in the real world of plants and food.

It showcases all of the skills Gentleman Scholar brings to the table in one cohesive, and fun video.

This mixed media approach is something that the Gentleman Scholar crew accel at enough to be able to pull it off again in a different way for UnitedHealth Group.

This time around, all of the live-action elements were shot stop motion style in a blank tabletop environment, then simple, 2D line drawn animations were incorporated in to build a full story of both practical and animated assets.

Here’s one more spot showing off some of Gentleman Scholar’s best creative skills rolled into one. For this Propel water spot, the team first shot a background of colorful and lively athletic footage. Lots of care of was put into color choices for the shoot that would eventually get mixed with overlaid color blocks to amp up the energy.

The self-proclaimed typography geeks added in fun type elements both over and integrated into the footage, and edited the whole thing with quick cuts and jumps to a fun hip-hop track that makes the whole commercial feel more like a modern music video than an ad.

And we all know you love watching music videos more than ads, so…mission accomplished.

Gentleman Scholar continues to impress with every new piece they add to their site. Their range of abilities is stunning and just about everything they touch is executed to perfection. Whether it’s full-on live-action, quirky 2D animation, polished 3D, or some combination of the above, you always know the result will be worth watching, at least a couple of times over.