Director/DP Rich Michell has joined STORY for national representation in advertising. A versatile talent, Michell combines storytelling skill with deep experience in product and tabletop cinematography. His credits include such brands as 3M/Scotch, General Mills, Target, Subway, UnitedHealthCare and Wendy’s.
Michell comes to STORY following a long run with Twist, Minneapolis, a company he co-founded. There, he developed a strong national and regional client base. He directed more than a dozen commercials for 3M through Grey, NY, many combining performance, product and humor. One recent spot features a Post-It note sticky enough to hold a terrier off the ground.
“The art direction and choreography of each spot is defined to fit the function and design of the product,” Michell says. “In the process, we developed a graphic and playful style that highlight the individual products and create a cohesive design for the variety of 3M brands.”
In a spot for the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, a boy turns his apartment into a make-shift movie theater: he adjusts a window to provide a “letterbox” view of the apartment of a quarreling French couple across the way.
Trained as a fine artist, Michell began his career as a camera operator and cinematographer. He broke into directing through tabletop work, but soon expanded into performance-driven storytelling.
STORY, headed by EP Mark Androw, is represented on the East Coast by SuperPowers, in the Midwest, in the Southeast by Miller + Associates, in the Southwest by Gossip!, and on the West Coast by Yvette Lubinsky.
SCHROM x Yacht Club and Be Electric Studios Launch Electric XR for Virtual Production
SCHROM x Yacht Club, a full-service live-action, tabletop, and postproduction company, has teamed with Be Electric Studios, a soundstage, equipment rental, and virtual production company, to launch Electric XR, a virtual production collective.
Industry veteran Thomas Rossano will lead the new venture, which provides advanced virtual production solutions across multiple facilities. He brings over 25 years of experience in live-action, tabletop, postproduction and talent curation to enhance Electric XR’s offerings as a resource for brands and agencies, as well as other production companies in need of virtual production solutions. Additionally Rossano continues to serve as EP at XR New York (XR-NY), a role he’s held since December 2022. SCHROM x Yacht Club originally established XR-NY to help provide XR services for third-party rentals. While XR-NY will continue to function independently for SCHROM X Yacht Club, it now operates under the Electric XR umbrella.
Rossano’s expertise spans producing live-action commercials, branded content, interactive and experiential content. In addition to leading Electric XR, he holds responsibilities at SCHROM x Yacht Club which include driving business development, collaborating with sales reps and expanding the company’s creative talent network. Rossano’s career includes serving as an exec producer at Hungry Man for about 11 years, right from that company’s inception. He then went on to become a partner at Station Film where he also had a lengthy tenure. Later he was a partner at PRISM. Then after the pandemic hit, he became a freelance EP for nearly two years, looking into opportunities in virtual production, which led him to XR NY and now Electric XR. Over the years, he has produced high-profile... Read More