A veteran trailer editor launched a new agency he can run from the edit bay

Joshua Rogers, a veteran creative advertising executive who previously worked as VP and creative director at Zealot and Buddha Jones, has launched Gravity, a new independent agency built around the craft of film and TV campaign work.

The founding team is small and senior by design: editors Matt McCrory and Brent Howard, producer Patrick Dirks, and creative director and editor Kazadi Katambwa, who previously worked with Rogers at Buddha Jones and spent three years as Lead Creative at Amazon Studios, managing campaigns for The Peripheral, The Power, Shelter and The Expanse. Katambwa’s earlier work with Rogers at Buddha Jones included campaigns for Wonder Woman, Dunkirk, Mad Max: Fury Road and the entire Dark Knight trilogy.

Rogers says the motivation was deliberately anti-scale: “I wanted to build a company that I could run from the edit bay, not from a big office or a Zoom window.” The model is deep immersion in the source material — the team aims to be of service to the intellectual property itself, adapting to each client’s brand DNA and working as an extension of the client’s internal creative department.

Gravity has already put the model to work, contributing to promotional efforts for season 13 of American Horror Story and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and handling the theatrical rerelease of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

For independent teams, Gravity is a useful counter-example to the growth-at-all-costs agency story: a launch that treats seniority and craft as the product, not headcount. The bet is that clients with major IP would rather buy a small team that disappears into their story than a large one that processes it.

Source: Ungrid Now — “Creative Ad World Gets New Edge: Rogers Launches Gravity”