The Making of ‘Rufus’

The 23rd floor at Starhouse HQ, where the Star Sports team sits, is steeped in the high-energy of passionate sports lovers and ideamongers. When they take time out to talk about a successful campaign, in-between the daily madness, they exude the same enthusiasm. Their eyes light up, and all that.

As the On-Air Promo team for International Sports huddled inside a conference room, we could sense this playful mood – it was also one of extreme satisfaction for a job well done. Just last month they had won a Gold for Best Promo and a Silver for Best CG Animation at the PromaxBDA India Awards for the Wimbledon ‘Rufus’ promo.

It was the final validation for all the hard work they had put in. They exchanged glances and laughed intermittently as they recalled the days leading up to the campaign – 7 long and trepid days as they feared the promo would fall flat at the execution stage just after they had landed on one of the most brilliant ideas. Like it usually is in the world of crazy ad ideas, it involved several unrelated ingredients – a bird, a tennis court, and a historically true factoid that nobody knew of.

In June 2016, the marketing team, Jarmanjeet Randhawa and Snigdha S, had come armed with insights and possible hooks for the campaign to announce Wimbledon 2016 on Star Sports. They’d also brought in Rachna Nayyar from programming to help with the same.

The Creative and OAP teams was psyched with what they just heard. This was enough, they didn’t need to hear the other hooks. Vaibhav Chib, VP & OAP Head, and Abhijat Bharadwaj, Executive Producer, immediately put their teams to work.

“I remember when Rachna and our marketing team first mentioned Rufus, Vaibhav and I were sold. We just had to use him! We just needed to figure out how,” recalls Bharadwaj.

Chib was confident from the get go, “From an executional standpoint, I knew we would be able to pull it off. The trick was to source the best shots of Rufus from the Wimbledon archives.”

As their minds started churning with script ideas, execution challenges, footage requirements, they knew they had something big on their hands. This could possibly lead to an award-winning campaign.

"But, wait, could this idea get approved? And then it did; we were shocked!" says Aditya Rathod, producer, OAP. 

The team’s writers, Dhruv Tiwari and Priyank Gupta then used “pens, papers, laptops and anything else that produced words” to bring the script to life. They wrote a humorous, witty script that was hooked on the idea that ‘Rufus envies you. Because he doesn’t get to watch the Wimbledon, but you can. So you should’.

“Our first order of business was to get Rufus footage from the Wimbledon team; for our promo to come alive, this footage was key,” says Raviraj Shikari, Senior Motion Graphic Design.

“Despite the setback, the graphics team believed in their abilities and pulled a hawk out of thin air. It turns out, we didn’t really need footage of Rufus!” says Chib.

“You see this shot. The bird is actually not there. It’s just a shot of the tennis court. And we have used our graphic to perch Rufus on this wall,” explained the team.

The OAP team also created a ‘BEL19VE’ campaign to support Roger Federer in his pursuit of the 19^th Grand Slam title.

The team is looking forward to some exciting work on the upcoming English Premier League that starts in August, and the ongoing 71^st Season of Formula One.