Rocket Studio 1524C Cloverfield Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90404 Phone: (310) 829-9800 www.rocketart.com	HOURLY RATES: “We bid per project.” PRIMARY EQUIPMENT: Completely Mac-based studio—“the latest and the greatest” equipment—G4s with the max RAM, etc.	SPEED OF TURNAROUND: Average three to five working days, but “if anything needs to be done sooner, we’ll do it.” CONTACT FOR RETOUCHING SERVICES: Judy Linden, managing director, judy@rocketart.com Gordon Morris, creative director, gordon@rocketart.com

ROCKET STUDIO

Founded by Judy Linden and Gordon Morris in October 2001, Rocket Studio is comprised of the former retouching staff from Metaphor, which folded its retouching services. Linden and Morris have created an intimate boutique servicing art directors and photographers and specializing in ad campaigns. Rocket staffs four retouchers, with Morris acting as the head retoucher.

Ad agency clients include L.A. locals TBWA\Chiat\Day, Team One advertising and DDB, as well as Detroit’s J. Walter Thompson and New York’s Young & Rubicam. Linden explains that client art directors typically hook up a Rocket retoucher with the campaign photographer in preproduction, so the team can come up with the best way to shoot for the desired result. “We work hand in hand,” Linden says.

Developing Gatorade’s Propel Fitness Water ad campaign with Element 79 Partners ad agency of Chicago, creatives from Rocket Studio met with agency art director Doug Behm and photographer Sandro in preproduction to anticipate the digital compositing needed in postproduction. After Sandro completed the shoot, Rocket rejoined with Behm and chose nearly 300 images to scan. Because Rocket and Element 79 are half a country apart, Rocket coordinated with the agency’s printer in Chicago and set up a system to provide Behm with digital proofs matching those used by Rocket in L.A.

The campaign’s first image was a faucet with a drip of water morphing into a tiny athlete. Rocket Studio composed the photographic elements and illustrated the water effects in Photoshop using its dual gigahertz processor Mac G4s, completing the job in roughly eight hours. The campaign’s second image, a water fountain with a spout of water transforming into a string of soccer players, was then composited from multiple elements using Photoshop and Illustrator, taking more like 12 hours to create.

Morris said the most complicated retouching was of the third image: a standard office water cooler filled with athletes actively participating in their sports. He explained the challenge of creating the image was that the water cooler was not only filled with water but was cylindrical, which would distort the appearance of all the athletes inside.

“Each individual had to be carefully placed in such a way as to show clearly his or her sport, then distorted to match the surface of the cooler and the effect of the water covering,” he said, adding, “At one point the decision was made to flip the cooler, so all type on the cooler and on the athletes had to be corrected.” Morris said that because of the complexity of the effects, the first round on this image took 24 hours to execute.

When completed, the Propel water campaign ran nationally in Sports Illustrated, People, Cosmo and many other major consumer magazines. Cheers.