Customer experience agency Definition 6 has brought Crystal Hall aboard as SVP/creative director. She brings years of experience in the media and entertainment industry spanning branding, advertising, and marketing. Hall has driven development for more than a dozen rebrands, digital experiences, and cable channel relaunches, including Showtime, FX, The Movie Channel, Smithsonian Channel, and truTV.
Prior to joining Definition 6, Hall founded and ran two creative agencies. Most recently, she was chief creative officer of Specter Hall, where she worked on social, digital, and brand initiatives for Audible and launched the branding and creative strategy for multiple tech start-ups, including destination-based AR app District-1. Prior to that, she was co-founder/executive creative director of Spark+Sizzle, most notably producing an award-winning interactive digital campaign for American Horror Story with FX.
Before that, Hall was at Showtime Networks for more than 15 years with the last 10 in the role of VP/creative director of network branding and design. There, she led the Showtime brand transition into the digital environment and executed thousands of projects, including 360º marketing campaigns, social content, product development, network rebrands, and show packaging. During her tenure, Hall led six Showtime network rebrands, including the celebrated “Brace Yourself” integrated brand marketing campaign. Of the many series launches she worked on, one of her favorites is the Billions launch campaign, which involved a takeover of the Oculus in Lower Manhattan with 50 screens of all shapes and sizes, including two massive 20 X 30-foot displays.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More