Red Car/ San Francisco, headed by managing director Jan Frei, has secured editors Peter Sorcher and Kerie Kimbrell. Sorcher comes over to the recently launched shop from Red Car/ New York. (Red Car also maintains editorial boutiques in Santa Monica, Chicago and Dallas.) And Kimbrell is set to join Red Car/San Francisco at the beginning of January. She will return to the spot arena after having spent nearly 10 months at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based streaming media company i-Beam.
Sorcher has cut the first job under the Red Car/San Francisco banner, a project out of DDB San Francisco for an advertiser that Frei wasn’t yet at liberty to publicly identify. Red Car/San Francisco also just wrapped a four-spot package for another undisclosed client–this one via Young & Rubicam, San Francisco, cut by Hal Honigsberg of Red Car’s Santa Monica operation. As with Honigsberg, Red Car/San Francisco has access to the talent at the other Red Car shops and can make those editors available to the Bay Area agency community, as needed.
Sorcher has been with Red Car/New York virtually since its inception some eight years ago. "In many ways, Red Car/San Francisco reminds me of Red Car/New York when it started out," related Sorcher. "That’s part of the attraction for me—the chance to be in on helping to build a new operation and developing a business base in San Francisco. It’s the best of both worlds, because I can still go to New York when necessary and continue to work with my clients there as well."
Sorcher’s recent commercial credits include client-direct work for the National Football League; a Lockheed Martin spot, out of DDB, New York; and an assignment for the Brand Jordan line of apparel via Wieden + Kennedy, New York. Sorcher’s reel contains work for such advertisers as New Balance shoes for Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG, New York; Canon Optura, out of DCA Advertising, New York; and Coca-Cola. (The Coke work in 1993 was part of the first flight of ads conceptualized and developed by Creative Artists Agency, Beverly Hills.) Sorcher also serves as sound designer on many of his spots, adding an extra dimension to Red Car/San Francisco.
Kimbrell started out in the Bay Area as an assistant editor on features (e.g., Godfather III, War of the Roses). She was then hired as an assistant editor at the commercial division of San Rafael, Calif.-based Industrial Light+Magic. After three years in that role, she was promoted to full-fledged editor at what became Industrial Light+Magic Commercial Productions (ILMCP), San Rafael and Los Angeles. During her five years editing spots at ILMCP, her credits included ads for Coke, Miller Genuine Draft, Nissan, Honda, Pontiac, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell and Nokia.
Ending her ILMCP tenure in ’99, she joined San Francisco editorial house Pomegranit. There she spent a year cutting, among other jobs, a Pillsbury campaign for Leo Burnett Co., Chicago; a trailer promoting the San Francisco Film Festival; and a Direct Web spot for Think New Ideas, Los Angeles.
Kimbrell then joined i-Beam, lured by the booming dot-com market. While there in an engineering/research/troubleshooting capacity, she got a technical education, learning about what kind of footage encodes well and translates effectively for play on the Internet. However, Kimbrell wanted to resume her creative spot-editing career and jumped at the Red Car opportunity, which reunites her with Frei, a former Pomegranit collegue.
Frei noted that Red Car/San Francisco is looking to add homegrown editors and bring new talent into the Northern California market. She said that she and Red Car president Larry Bridges are committed to the company’s becoming an integral part of the San Francisco spotmaking scene. Red Car/San Francisco has been operating out of interim quarters, but projects that it will be up and running in new permanent digs by next week, when phase one of construction on its 4,000-square-foot facility is slated for completion. Phase 2 gets underway in 2001.
Upon being named earlier this year to head the then planned Red Car/San Francisco (SHOOT, 4/7, p. 7), Frei began the search for a site. After several months, she found space in the Embarcadero area, which is home to many of San Francisco’s top ad agencies. Construction was initiated and the aforementioned phase one will include two editing suites.
Frei has been a longstanding member of the San Francisco advertising community. Before coming aboard to help form Red Car/San Francisco, she spent three and a half years at Pomegranit, starting as producer and moving up to exec producer. Prior to Pomegranit, she served for a year as a producer at Good Pictures, the now defunct creative editorial/post division of San Francisco-based Western Images. Frei brought over to Good Pictures some 13 years of experience on the agency side of the business. In ’82, she broke in as a production coordinator at Chiat/Day, San Francisco. Within a year and a half, she was producing for the agency and continued in that capacity when the shop became Goldberg Moser O’Neill. (TBWA/Chiat/Day later re-entered the San Francisco market.)
Red Car is in the midst of expansion on several fronts. The overall company recently extended its reach to Europe, entering into relationships with eight London-based editors for U.S. representation (SHOOT, 11/3, p. 1). And Red Car/Chicago has secured the services of veteran editor Bob Carr, who comes over from the recently shuttered NuWorld Editorial, in which he was partnered (SHOOT, 11/17, p. 1).
