If you’ve only thought of Hitachi as a TV maker, think again. That’s the message behind Hitachi’s latest branding campaign, a major departure from the core product-driven campaigns of the past. Confronted by a world dominated by social networking sites and user-generated content, Hitachi decided instead to illustrate how it is transforming the lives of customers and end users across a variety of industries in their own words with True Stories, a series of documentary short films on the Web.
In the first of five films, each five minutes long, on www.hitachi.com/truestories, Small Town Oregon Logs On, viewers see what happens when Hitachi fiber-to-the-home technology is used to connect the remote coastal town of Bandon to the country’s fastest communication network. A fisherman, artist, skateboarder, among others, share how their lives are changing for the better thanks to Hitachi. Another film, Hope in Houston, is about a cancer patient who flies himself to Houston for treatment sessions involving Hitachi’s new proton beam therapy system installed at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The films, conceived and developed with McCann Erickson, San Francisco, were directed by Matt Ogens of bicoastal HKM. The freedom and collaboration involved in this project stood out the most for the director. The documentary style approach required having no scripts and a different type of casting than spot work.
“We had a local coordinator and he would just sort of go around town taking pictures and videos of towns just finding interesting characters for me,” explained Ogens. “Then I would go to those cities–a lot earlier than I would for an out of town commercial–just to get a feel for the town and meet people. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun too.”
Because of the nature of the films, it also made more sense to shoot them for the most part in HD. “When you don’t have a script, and especially dealing with real people, you tend to shoot and shoot and shoot,” said Ogens. “It would not be practical to use film or cost effective. I like continuing to shoot and not having to stop and reload. A lot of the best stuff is when you’re not asking questions–the moments in between like when you’re spending time reloading.”
And based on his fondness for the Super 8 format, he used it when people talked about historical topics as in the Bandon, Oregon short. He also employed Super 8 to add texture to the crime scene segments in another one of the films, A New Breed of Bloodhound, explaining how Hitachi storage systems are helping the South Carolina Computer Crime Center keep the Internet safe. Additional films in the series include a documentary about a power plant that uses the company’s supercritical coal-fired technology to produce clean energy from coal, and a story about how Hitachi’s plasma screen technology migrated from college laboratories to family living rooms.
Ogens’ involvement in postproduction for all of the films was also unlike his traditional spot work.
“Usually with commercials directors aren’t really involved with postproduction, which I never really understood. To me half of directing is in production and half is in post. On a normal commercial when I am done directing and not involved in postproduction I feel like I have done only half my job. Because when you are shooting anything, whether it is scripted or unscripted, there are certain shots you do for certain reasons and certain things match up with other things you have shot and there is no way for an editor or a creative to know that without being in the room and showing them.”
Not only did Ogens collaborate extensively with editor Michael Victor of Play Editorial, he actually handpicked the editor with the agency’s approval. “I got to work with him a lot,” said Ogens. He would do his cut and then I would do my cut before we presented it to the agency. A lot of times my cut wasn’t that different from what the agency came up with and I think we ended up with a better project being able to collaborate with the editor and the agency,”
The online films will be supported by advertising and media placements including online, print and out-of-home venues.
Craig Henighan Sounds Off On “Deadpool & Wolverine”
Hollywood lore has it that character actor Edmund Gwenn--while on his deathbed--quipped, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
The second part of that darkly witty utterance remains all too true today as Craig Henighan--a Best Achievement in Sound Mixing Oscar nominee in 2019 for Roma--can attest in that he had to grapple with the sonic of being comic for this year’s box office hit, Deadpool & Wolverine (20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios).
The degree of inherent difficulty was ramped up even further because Deadpool & Wolverine had to seamlessly bring together high action-adventure exploits with moments and dialogue that tickled the funny bone. There’s a mesh of humorous banter--a staple of the franchise--along with major spectacle replete with explosions, fights, an impactful score and off-the-wall musical numbers.
Henighan explained that among the prime challenges for him from a sound perspective was having to make sure every joke landed within the construct of a superhero film. The tendency for a tentpole movie of this variety, he noted, is to gravitate towards big, loud audio spanning music, dialogue and sound effects. But the unique comedic element of Deadpool & Wolverine necessitated that re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Henighan strike a delicate balance. “You need to get out of the way for the comedy,” he related. The jokes in a superhero film become “a real dance” as Henighan had to establish a rhythm that did justice to both the comedy and the action as the narrative moves back and forth between them--and sometimes the funny and the high energy, high decibel superhero dynamic unfold simultaneously in a scene or sequence. The “sonic fabric” has to... Read More