Rooster

In Rooster, Steve Carell plays Greg Russo, a popular fiction writer whose escapist novels feature the title character. Rooster is a cool, sexy man of action - the guy Greg wishes he could be.

Instead, Greg’s former life has fallen apart and he finds himself a fish out of water teaching at a New England college, trying to heal his complicated relationship with his daughter. To show him turning over a new leaf, we created a sequence in which we watch pages from Greg’s books peel away while words and letters break free from their paragraphs, tumbling and colliding with illustrated characters from Greg’s new life.

Inspired by the drawing style of Rooster’s book covers, we created original illustrations of the show’s characters, and animated them in 2D inside the 3D book environment. The typography interacts with the images, with behaviors motivated by the scene- falling like rain, rising like smoke, or dissipating like steam, for example. The sequence concludes with Greg depicted as his character Rooster, surrounded by the rubble of his collapsed words.