Seminar For Agency Producers Produced by Therapy Studios and Stopp Interactive
Earlier this month, ad agency producers received a crash course in the ever-increasing digital aspects of advertising campaigns at the 2010 Summer Digital Roundtable presented by Therapy Studios and Stopp Interatice. Postproduction company Therapy is involved in editorial, graphics, finishing, sound design, mix and color correction for commercials, features, music videos, and online media. Held at Therapy’s facility in West Los Angeles, the educational seminar moderated by Becky Ebenkamp featured presentations from Venables Bell & Partners, Stopp, Therapy, Textopoly, FEED Company and Blush/LA.
With the ad industry undergoing a sea change — in that more campaigns are integrating interactive online components to coincide with traditional print and broadcast — agencies are looking to their broadcast producers to steer these interactive elements as well. The seminar worked to answer questions on many traditional broadcast producers’ minds, such as what integrated production entails and what is an agency producer’s role within that production. It also provided an overview of technical aspects and presented creative approaches to interactive production, digital production, mobile engagement and social media.
Not every agency wants a do-it-all producer. John Eagan and Mandi Holdorff of Venables Bell & Partners, who served up the keynote address, provided a case study on their integrated Audi Super Bowl campaign, The Green Police that illustrated this point. “While many agencies believe that there is one super producer who can produce both interactive and broadcast components flawlessly, that’s not the position that Venebles takes,” says Holdorff. “What makes an interactive campaign successful in our opinion, is having collaboration and transparency between your broadcast and digital producers.” Eagan adds, “From an interactive producer’s standpoint, my job was to control the conversation about the Green Police. The biggest challenge was to get the best partners in the room and teach them how to deal with messaging around the Super Bowl. That’s when my job shifts from doing a site to controlling the flow of media.”
Executive Producer Jesper Palsson of Stopp helped the group to understand the technical space in which interactive production occurs. Palsson noted that the workflow for interactive is much less linear than for traditional media. “There are more components and more things that can go wrong on a big website with hosting and banners,” he says. “It’s all about collaboration and asking questions.” To explain timelines and digital production further, Palsson shared a case study of Stopp’s The Hero campaign for Radiotjänst, which was one of the first to utilize user-submitted content. It spread virally in the company’s native country of Sweden and has lead to a U.S.-version of the spot.
Executive Producer Joseph DiSanto of editorial and post company Therapy Studios echoed the importance of collaboration between broadcast and digital producers. He shared some of Therapy’s recent work, including an interactive microsite his company built for Atlantic Records to support recording artist B.o.B’s single “Nothin On You”, through which viewers could upload their own photos into an online version of the music video and share it. Additionally, DiSanto brought producers up to speed on the more common digital tools being used in these projects, and the impact they have on production, postproduction and interactive development. The seminar also highlighted workflow variables that come into play when digital assets are being shared across platforms and multiple vendors now more than ever.
Seminar attendee Leah Bohl, a producer at the Team One advertising agency in L.A., found this educational opportunity indispensible. “Bringing industry people together,” she says, “to discuss and learn how we grow as producers no matter what discipline we specialize in is important. It’s all the same skill sets that we draw from, but having a general technical knowledge as a broadcast producer is becoming imperative. I was happy to be included in the sharing of experiences with other agencies and technology companies about how we stay on the forefront of technology in the ever-changing advertising landscape.”
Other interactive discussion points came from Naushad Huda, founder of Textopoly, a mobile engagement agency that creates dialogues between brands and their consumers, and from Josh Warner, founder of Feed Company, which “seeds” advertiser videos on the Web for maximum exposure.
Independent producer Anne Kurtzman was impressed with the seminar and came away with a better handle of the role of producer in an integrated production. “The roundtable was really beneficial,” says Kurtzman, a member of The Poolhouse collective. “This profession changes every time you blink. When you read a lot of job descriptions for producers they include terminology for and references to digital production that, as a broadcast producer, seem extremely foreign, and it was really educational to find out where the overlap is. It behooves all us producers to keep current on technology and be able to talk the talk.”
Participants were given an educational resource book that included a comprehensive interactive and digital production glossary compiled by Therapy and Stopp. The book introduced Stndrd_@, a new consortium that has devised an open source approach to creating best practices for the interactive production community. The digital version of this book is available for download on Therapy’s Facebook page .
Juliette Welfling Takes On A Musical, A Crime Thriller, Comedy and Drama In “Emelia Pérez”
Editor Juliette Welfling has a track record of close-knit, heartfelt collaboration with writer-director Jacques Audiard, a four-time BAFTA Award nominee for Best Film not in the English Language--starting with The Beat That My Heart Skipped in 2006, then A Prophet in 2010, Rust and Bone in 2013, and Dheepan in 2017. He won for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet.
Welfling cut three of those features: A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and Dheepan. And that shared filmography has since grown to most recently include Emelia Pérez, the Oscar buzz-worthy film from Netflix. Welfling herself is not stranger to Academy Award banter. In fact, she earned a Best Achievement in Film Editing Oscar nomination in 2008 for director Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Emelia Pérez is a hybrid musical/drama/thriller which introduces us to a talented but undervalued lawyer named Rita (portrayed by Zoe Saldana) who receives a lucrative offer out of the blue from a feared drug cartel boss who’s looking to retire from his sordid business and disappear forever by becoming the woman he’s always dreamt of being (Karla SofÃa Gascón in a dual role as Manitas Del Monte/Emilia Pérez). Rita helps pull this off, orchestrating the faked death of Del Monte who leaves behind a widow (Jessi, played by Selena Gomez) and kids. While living comfortably and contently in her/their new identity, Pérez misses the children. Pérez once again enlists Rita--this time to return to family life, reuniting with the kids by pretending to be their aunt, the sister of Del Monte. Now as an aunt, Pérez winds up adopting a more altruistic bent professionally,... Read More