Cooking with Caviar

Imagine that you could manipulate your television screen the same way that you tap and slide your way around your iPhone. Or perhaps, it’s not you, rearranging the images, but the host of SportsCenter. Or what if Vanna White could reveal vowels or consonants without having to traipse across a soundstage in an evening gown? These issues are at the forefront of Chris Roe’s mind, and he’s planning to make them a reality. Not bad for a guy who a few years ago was working out of his garage.

What’s their Gig?

Chris Roe’s three-and-a-half year old company, Fish Eggs (pun absolutely intended), specializes in broadcast packages for reality programming, including Gladiators, Wipe Out, Dance Machine and Duel. The show that put his company, as well as 25 leggy brief-case-toting models, on the map was Deal or No Deal. Unlike a lot of graphic houses that are brought in only during post, Fish Eggs was hired before production started on the show and Roe was part of the creative team along with the director, art director, casting director, etc.

“The key, for me, is finding the simplest core of what the show represents,” explains Roe about how he approaches the look for Deal or No Deal, and all of the other packages Fish Eggs creates. For Deal or No Deal Roe had a few creative parameters: the show needed to look like “old money” and “not be too Vegasy.” So he came up with the show’s omnipresent gold bar, because, according to Roe, “it represents solid, tangible, real money. Not paper.”

While the show’s graphics packages are largely informed by that single image, Roe and his team are still creative partners on the show, charged with creating special packages for special occasions. He half-jokingly speculates that the gold bar might be transformed into drumsticks for the Thanksgiving episode.

The Cool Factor

Because graphics and on-screen information are such an integral component of reality television, Roe envisions the next generation of the genre to include interactive elements, including on-air talent manipulating graphics in real time. Roe’s outlook is simple: “It’s important that graphics are functional. There will come a time when people will need to interact with what is on their screen – holographic stuff, touchscreen stuff – that’s the future of television, and I want to be at that forefront.”

Roe envisions hosts effortlessly sliding information across your screen, much like in Minority Report. Eventually, he sees the same technique being used by viewers on the other side of the screen, in the same way that obsessed iPhone users double tap and slide their screens to the locate the nearest all-night pizzeria.

The Geek Gactor

Roe has long since moved out of his garage – “There wasn’t a car in it, but it was a garage,” he explains – and into swankier digs in Venice, California, digs which house his full-time staff of seven, as well as freelancers. “I remember I went into pitch boards for Fear Factor,” Roe recalls, “there were 15 people in the room and when I walked in someone said ‘Hey, there’s the guy in the garage!’ and I thought, ‘Man, I gotta get out of my garage.'” Much later, he found that the “guy in the garage” thing had its own cache when the executive producer of Gladiators told him, “We thought we had found somebody that nobody else knew about. We didn’t want anyone to find out about you.” Too late.