Global creative collective Thinkingbox has opened an office in New York, naming Christine Clark as its managing partner. Clark previously led the Toronto Thinkingbox office, growing the team from three to 35+ people, establishing Thinkingbox in that Canadian market in 2016, and growing the agency’s presence on the East Coast. The new NYC office is the fifth for Thinkingbox, joining Los Angeles and Salt Lake City (Utah) in the U.S., alongside Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. Thinkingbox currently works with Pinterest, Verizon, Chobani, NBCU, and several other NYC-based brands and agencies and plans to grow the current four-person office into a force to service that office’s clients fully.
Culver City, Calif.-based creative marketing agency Compadre has added Sean Maekawa as executive producer and Tamara Gavric as sr. producer. Maekawa joins Compadre following a tenure at Hook, where he most recently served as EP, working with such clients as Amazon, Mailchimp, and Google. For the latter, he spearheaded the FWA Award-winning “Life of Your Code” interactive experience. Before that, Maekawa was a digital/social producer at Ignition, where he produced Clio Award-winning campaigns for theatrical and home entertainment releases for ABC, Sony Entertainment, Warner Bros., ESPN, and more. Prior to Compadre, Gavric held the same title at Hook, where she produced multimedia brand and interactive content for Cameo, Google, and Mailchimp. Previous tenures included Wondros and Trailer Park. At Wondros, Gavric ascended to a creative producer role, working on story-driven video content for clients such as National Institutes of Health, Open Society Foundations, and XPRIZE. At Trailer Park, her work spanned home entertainment campaigns, packaging, web assets, and print collateral for entertainment properties from Warner Bros., Disney+, and Netflix.
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More