“I believe the city of New York really is safer today then it was years ago,” said Evelyn Rosario, a NYPD officer. The line comes from Fighting Crime With Ones and Zeros, a six-minute documentary style video from Ogilvy, New York and Maysles Films, New York, that supports IBM, which provided the technology for the Real Time Crime Center, a 24-hour war room that provides the NYPD with a web-based interface to track data to fight crime. (For an interview with Richard Toranzo, IBM’s Global Program Manager, Branded Entertainment, click here.)
The video, made by Jeff Feuerzeig, the Maysles director who won the Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005 for his film The Devil and Daniel Johnston, combines a reenactment of an actual crime with interviews with New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and other NYPD and IBM personnel. The other main character is Mike Hobarcz, a veteran New York City cab driver, who takes viewers on a tour of the city, recounting how it’s changed over the years and become safer.
The video, which plays at www.ibm.com/special, with a two-minute TV version on CNBC’s The Business of Innovation, supports IBM by “delving into an unexpected thing they work on every day,” said Ogilvy’s group creative director Jeff Curry. “They do innovative things you don’t know about and this rethinks the way they fight crime.”
The interviews were shot at 1 Police Plaza headquarters, with the rest of the scenes shot around the city. “We went to a pizza parlor where the crime took place, then to the apartment where he was busted,” Curry said.
The video chronicles how the police caught a man who robbed the pizzeria by tracking him through the “Sugar” tattoo on his neck.
The pizza parlor and the apartment weren’t actual scenes from the crime but recreations, Feuerzeig said. “It was a technique I created in The Devil and Daniel Johnston called ghost recreations. We go to locations where the crime could have taken place through visuals, sound and point of view. We recreate the crime without actors. You see the pizza slices and the gun but no one’s there. The camera is the point of view of the perpetrator. The camera is his eyes.
“The fun of mini-documentary is not just shots, it’s about how sequences come together to tell a story,” Feuerzeig said. “I conceived the sequence in the pizza parlor to where we capture him in the apartment and photo boarded it out shot-by-shot to tell the story with ghost recreation. It’s far more compelling when you don’t see the actors.”
The interviews were “the foundation of the work,” he said. “They’re conducted first to get the narrative spine of the story with visually striking compositions.”
The cab driver brings a gritty realism to the film. “You feel the effects of how the city’s changing through his clear-eyed point of view,” Feuerzeig said.
He shot the film with a 24p DV video camera with a Mini 35 adapter, which “made a huge difference because you can control the depth of field,” he said. “The 35mm film lens wasn’t built to go on a tiny video camera, but with the Mini 35 adapter you can go there. It makes it more of a film rig.”
Fighting Crime With Ones and Zeros is certainly a film, not a commercial. It demonstrates how long-form video is taking advertising in a new direction.
(For an interview with Richard Toranzo, IBM’s Global Program Manager, Branded Entertainment, click here.)
