Be Yourself in Any Language — Shawn Huddleston

Rosetta Stone | Be Yourself in Any Language | TV Spot + Integrated Campaign

Are you funny? Be funny in French. Or reserved in Russian.

A big challenge of language learning is communicating with nuanced emotions and tones so that you don’t have to be a different person when you speak a different language. We wanted to own this as a Brand promise to current and potential customers and empower people to be themselves in any language.

Role: Creative Direction, Art Direction, Key Art Designer

The plan.

I was in love with the level of surrealism in this spot since I saw the very first storyboard. I knew I wanted to carry it over into the supporting campaign and with a bottomless well of personality traits to create a bunch of vignettes from, the challenge was to create scenarios that hammered home the tagline while being flexible enough to perform effectively in every funnel segment.

How far we going?

Surrealism can get weird pretty quickly. It was important to test its effective limits early to create the boundaries of the sandbox to play in. In keeping with the spirit of the spot, the right area for us was a tangible universe of bent proportions and optics vs a fantastical world that completely departed from the commercial and felt unrelatable. With that established, I started comping up options that played within our range of weird.