It's fitting that action sports network Fuel TV enlisted LA-based creative studio Lambo to craft the open for its New Pollution show, which spotlights the talents of extreme sport aficionados aged 16 and under (aka "groms"). After all, Lambo co-founder Justin Harder, a veritable mograph star since his days at Transistor Studios, has been compared to gravity-defying skateboard ace Tony Hawk for his seemingly super-human abilities in the field. And any interview featuring Harder, creative director Kurt Miller or executive producer PJ Wilson is peppered throughout with the word 'rad'. So when Fuel TV needed something appropriately frantic and campy yet cool, Lambo's playful but pro aesthetic was the logical choice.

The Lambo team opted to take the client's initial premise to feature monsters in the open to an extreme and created four different monsters, each one representing a particular action sport: skateboarding, motocross, surfing and snowboarding.

"It was a 'junk monster' idea that they had in the beginning," explains Harder, who directed the open. "And then we sort of took the idea and came up with four different monsters. Pave Man was the skate monster, Yeti was the snow monster, Muddy was the dirt monster, and Kurt had a name for the surf monster - AquaPuss."

With Lambo having a live-action studio built into their offices (dubbed "The Psycove"), the temptation to create a mixed-media smorgasbord rather than simply animate the characters proved too great to resist. Monster costumes were sewn, and miniature environments, ranging from mounds of dirt to mountains of sugar and plaster, were built for the "actors" to romp about in - producer Chad Towersly donned the AquaPuss, Muddy and Yeti outfits, while coordinator/prop builder Tilman Bandel brought the mysterious Pave Man to life.

"A lot of people thought we created the monsters in CG," says Miller. "If you look closely on the back of the Yeti guy, you can see stitching. But people thought it was all CG, which personally, I thought was really cool."

Lambo's bag of tricks for the open also incorporated 2D and 3D elements for the live-action characters to interact with, as well as a stop-motion animated paper wave that Harder calls "a total pain in the ass" to create.

"The idea was [to] make each theme for the monsters practically," he says. "It took for-fucking-ever, but it was the right way to go."

"We all bring something different to a project," muses Miller about the overall process. "And one of the things Justin brings is that he always wants to do things the hardest way humanly possible."

Lambo http://www.lambo.la