SHORT CUTS
Atlanta-based Dagnabit! completed a series of four :30s for Valley National Bank promoting its "Kids First Savings Account" program. Created by Princeton, N.J., agency Gillespie, the ads feature the animated adventures of Lee and his precocious little sister, Val, who happily embrace savings as a way to afford themselves such items as bicycles and toys. Dagnabit! director Robert Pope designed the characters and directed the animation. The rough drawings were hand-inked and scanned into Softimage Toonz ink and paint. From there, individual animated sequences were outputted to director John Ryan, who painted each image with delicate watercolors in the Painter program. Colored animation sequences were then outputted to a Flame suite at Crawford Post, Atlanta, where they were married to corresponding backgrounds. Mike Ferguson was executive producer for Dagnabit!, with Gary Milgrom producing.
Click 3X, New York, produced two up-front videos for Discovery Communications promoting the cross-platform marketing and brand building opportunities that the company offers to advertisers. Click 3X took both projects from concept through completion, providing such services as scriptwriting, live-action production, editorial, graphics design, animation and compositing. The first four-minute video promotes Discovery Solutions, Discovery Communications’ integrated sales and marketing division. The video provides an overview of the program, which in addition to on-air exposure on the company’s 14 entertainment channels offers sweepstake opportunities, marketing exposure on Discovery.com, Discovery Channel Store tie-ins and product integration. The piece also includes testimonials from corporate executives of such firms as Procter & Gamble (P&G), who have participated in Discovery Solutions. The video concludes with a 3-D graphic of a spinning globe displaying the logos of other Discovery Solutions partners. Click 3X’s production team flew to three cities to record testimonials from execs of P&G, Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company, 20th Century Fox and Royal Caribbean International. Additional source material was gleaned from dozens of hours of programming from Discovery Channel, TLC, The Travel Channel and other Discovery Communications brands. Click’s animation team created the grid-like globe that spins against a black background, while compositors set logos for General Motors, P&G, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, RadioShack and Suzuki, among others, into the rotating frame. The second tape highlights the features of Discovery Imedia, which includes the Discovery.com Web site, as well as Discovery’s interactive television and two-screen enhanced television programming. The visuals consist of an extended montage of layered Web pages, graphics and live-action elements. A recurring image shows consumers touching the TV screen. Click 3X’s production squad recorded talent against green screen, acquired elements directly from the Discovery.com Web site, gathered images from stock sources and married it together into a montage. Click 3X credits for the Discovery Solutions project include creative director Iain Greenway, executive producer Abbe Daniel, editor Dana Bol, writer David Seeley, and animators Anthony Filipakis and Pete Hamilton. For Discovery Imedia, Click’s Franco Fiore was creative director; Daniel served as executive producer; Seeley was writer; Ben Cerf, Heidi Ing and Rob Roth were animators; and Alicia Powers produced.
Robert Levy of Why Not Coco, Santa Monica, cut three :30s for agency The Phelps Group, Santa Monica, and its client, Petco. "Habitrail," "Pucker" and "Adoption" show Petco employees as children and later, adults, and why they love animals as much as they do. The commercials were directed by Mark Raymon Bennett of bicoastal Cohn+Company. Additional Why Not Coco credits go to assistant editor Lara Ramirez and executive producer Angela Galletta.
MUSIC NOTES
Fluid created the track for the New York Lottery’s latest instant game, Jumbo Bucks, out of DDB Worldwide, New York. "Elephant" features a folksy jingle composed by Fluid’s Andy Mendelson. Other Fluid personnel involved in the project included executive producer David Shapiro and producer Brad Stratton. Fluid’s visual effects artist David Sullivan provided online and visual effects services for the ad. Steve Horn of Steve & Linda Horn Inc., New York, directed the commercial. Fluid is headquartered in New York.
IN GEAR
The Eastman Kodak Company introduced the advertising-ready Kodak Digital Cinema Operating System (COS) at the 2003 Cinema Expo International Conference of exhibitors, distributors and industry suppliers. The system enables advertising suppliers and exhibitors to increase revenue from cinema commercials, and to enhance the movie-going experience with a wider range of pre-show content. The COS includes a main server in the cinema to receive and distribute content, as well as a mini-server and pre-show projector to display images on each screen. Content can also be shown on flat panels and monitors in the lobby. Connecting everything is a switchable, high-speed network powered by Kodak software. Kodak is testing its system and services at Vue Cinemas, Fulham Broadway, London; College Point Multiplex Cinemas, a National Amusements theatre, New York; Cinema Mediage, a Toho Company Ltd. Theatre, Tokyo; and at the Chinese Six, a Mann Theatre multiplex in Hollywood. Later tests will be done at a multiplex in Shanghai. Tests include preparation and delivery of advertising content from National Cinema Network (NCN), and Pro Motion Slides, New York; Sunrise, Tokyo; and Pearl & Dean, London.
