Bicoastal Mad River Post, which for years has shared work among its three offices, is on the verge of achieving true connectivity in the form of fiber optics. This change will allow even more job sharing, something the 10-year-old editorial house has made a cornerstone of its business plan.
To that end, Mad River, which opened a New York office five years ago, recently moved its operations out of a cramped space in Soho to a new 12,000 square foot office in the Flatiron District. Editor Dick Gordon, who works out of the New York office, says the new space was designed to create what he calls an "editorial village," based on the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson’s construction of the University of Virginia as an "academic village."
"If you walk through the space, it really feels like a village," says Gordon who came to Mad River almost three years ago after working as an in-house editor at bicoastal/international @radical.media for two years. Although Mad River’s New York office is relatively young, it has quickly grown, now outputting the highest capacity of the company’s work.
"The new space is more like a collection of edit houses than edit rooms," says Gordon. "Each door is different and every room has a different design. The idea was to create a comfortable working space, one that was open architecturally so we didn’t box ourselves in, and also one that was open to working with the expanding editing technologies even if we don’t necessarily have them ourselves."
Portable Post
The new facility underscores a company philosophy that has helped transform Mad River from a one-editor shop founded by Michael Elliot in Santa Monica into a strong, national "creative off-line" company with 12 editors-Elliot, Lucas Eskin, Travis Aitken, Lisa Cheek, Joel Marcus and Jack Douglas in Santa Monica; Pat Caballero in San Francisco; and Emily Dennis, Wendy Rosen, Charlie Cusumono, Peter Odiorne and Dick Gordon in New York. Although all of the editors are affiliated with an office of Mad River, they are available-and encouraged to work out of each of the company’s offices. As a group, according to Elliot, the editors run the entire gamut of the editing world-everything from comedy/dialogue to the slickest visuals. This diversity is reflected in the company’s recent work, which includes spots for clients such as Lincoln/Mercury, John Hancock and Nike. Upcoming projects include ads for Starburst, Coke’s new bottled water Dasanti, and the U.S. Navy.
And these diverse editors are also portable. "It’s possible for a job to begin in Los Angeles and then end up in New York with the transition seamless as far as the client is concerned because they are working with one editor and one company," Elliot says. "Right now we’re basically linked through FedEx, but our plan for the future is to wire all of the offices through fiber optics. So conceivably an editor in New York can work simultaneously with a Henry artist or music house in L. A. and not have to leave the East Coast. That day is quickly approaching and part of the construction of the New York office was set up to facilitate that technology as it appears."
As Gordon can attest, having this new technology would at the very least make editors’ lives less frenetic. On a job for Saturn’s Inner City Youth Alliance (I.C.Y.) through Publicis & Hal Riney San Francisco, for example, Gordon began editing the spots, "I.C.Y." and "Extremities," both directed by Lenard Dorfman of @radical.media, then flew to San Francisco with the drives (which are part of the Avid system and contain the digitized cuts) to do the offline. Next he jumped on a plane for L.A. to revise the spots, and was then back in San Francisco to repeat the offline process for a second spot. The voiceovers were not finished until Gordon and his drives returned to the Big Apple. "It’s amazing to me those drives held up," he says. "I think we had them on six different Avid systems between the three different offices."
Over at the San Francisco office, which opened six years ago when executive producer Janie Ford relocated there from L.A., a glimpse of the new fiber-optic technology is already available in some of the jobs they’re doing for high-end electronic clients. For instance, Ford says, they’ve been doing a lot of work for Electronic Arts, a gaming company, via San Francisco-based agency Odiorne Wilde Narraway & Partners. "When we were working on the animation, we would throw it onto FTP sites and the clients could download it from the Web and make revisions based on what they saw without having to come into the office," says Ford.
Although San Francisco is the smallest of the three Mad River offices, it provides the company with direct access to bid on jobs through agencies in that area. "There are some amazing agencies up here right now-Goodby, Riney and so many smaller boutiques," says Ford, referring to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Publicis & Hal Riney. "I think anyone would agree that San Francisco is producing some of the best creative work in the country and it’s really a testament to Mike’s foresight that he built up the office here."
Foresight is perhaps the driving force of the company’s connectivity-based philosophy, which Elliot says is far more interesting to him than putting Henrys into the company’s operations and moving into finishing work. "If you’ve got an artist or two on staff, then you’re not connected to the community at large," he says. "Our goal is to be able to connect to the overall community and provide our clients with the best pool of artists all over the country."
In short, do what they’re doing, only do it through the telephone wires. Whether those wires might extend across the Atlantic, especially given the success of a two-spot Fanta International campaign via Cliff Freeman & Partners, New York, and directed by Alan White of @radical. media, is still up for grabs. The spots, "Couch" and "Drop," which broke last summer, were handled through the New York office of Mad River, with Dennis cutting "Drop," and Elliot editing "Couch."
"Most of our international work comes in attached to individual directors," says Elliot, who adds that a bulwark of the company’s philosophy has always been director-oriented as much as it is agency-oriented.
"We try to bring production companies and directors into the process and at the same time not slight the agency and what they need to accomplish for their clients," he says. "It offers both entities a means to come together in the editorial process. At the same time, we offer the best services to our clients, and this goes for everything from food to the most serious special effects editing."
