SANTA MONICA, CA, JUNE 28, 2007 – The GARTNER directing team of Riess/Hill has consistently won admiration and accolades for their spot work, but with this new campaign for energy organization Flex Your Power, via agency Brainchild Creative, the duo may have struck new cinematic gold.

“The past ten years have been amazing, and we’re proud of so much of the work,” begins Amy Hill, who directs alongside husband Chris Riess. “I think the thing for us with Flex Your Power is that it is an extremely visual piece, and it was an opportunity for us to make that central to our creative contribution.”

As the directors have demonstrated with recent work, including the Gold Effie-winning five-year BP campaign; TEPP Anti-Smoking spots, and a new Salvation Army project, Riess/Hill has a gift for taking work that is meaningful to them and making it resonate with viewers.

Extremely poignant and equally stirring visually, Flex Your Power combines moving testimony from this generation with the wide-eyed yet somehow soulful and knowing perspective of our children. In the spots – which cover several key natural resource challenges faced by this and future generations – Riess/Hill positions TV sets in the midst of key settings…a lake, a field, a dam, and a dollhouse, to name a few. Children of all ages are seen at play in these locations as the adults’ messages are communicated to them.

California’s statewide energy efficiency and conservation program, Flex Your Power utilizes public outreach, advertising and online marketing tools to engage the state’s consumers in saving energy, money and the environment. “Energy is such an important topic and as parents of two small children we kept thinking about what will happen if we don’t address these issues,” Hill says. “We wanted to communicate the worst-case scenarios as well as the opposite of that…life as we know it: beautiful, happy, and so full of promise.” She notes that, while the testimonial segments are quite moving, “and we totally believed in the talent with whom we were working, it was great to translate the primary message visually.”

“After studying the Reiss/Hill reel, I made a very deliberate decision to wrap this in reality and to avoid writing copy that would sound ‘ad-like’,” explains Creative Director/Copy Writer Jef Loeb of  Brainchild, a six-year old creative consultancy that works both direct to client and for a wide range of agencies. “That meant writing the scripts very loosely and letting the directors work their magic. In fact, from the outset, we all agreed to use real people with very light acting experience – if any – and then draw thoughts and emotions out of them, rather than neatly packaged phrases.”

Working without a timed and precisely parsed script requires an extraordinary amount of trust in the director and production company. “Fortunately, Amy and Chris not only had the reel that showed they could pull it off,” Loeb says, “but our conversations throughout the process showed they got it in an unusually deep way. And, on a purely technical directorial level, I’ve never seen a director get this much out of kids. Amazing.”

In developing the vignettes, the directors resisted the “tendency is to be clever,” and chose instead to draw on daily life. “There’s something so beautiful about the simplicity and innocent joy of childhood,” say the directors, who used their own daughter’s dollhouse to represent the child’s world, into which the TV testimonial is inserted. “The child looks beyond this microcosm and into the future,” Hill says; “in a way that’s representative of this project’s objective in terms of the world today and what our kids will inherit and face tomorrow.”

The agency and directors strove to address global warming not strictly in “global” terms, which can be overbearing or overwhelmingly negative in tone. “We discovered in our research that the strongest consumer motivator was the simple, but stunningly difficult question, ‘How would we ever explain it to our kids that we knew exactly what to do about global warming and, yet, did nothing?’” says Loeb. The Riess/Hill spots go further, offering a lifeline of hope that translates the broad need into the simple, but powerful, proposition that it is within our power to make a difference. 

“I believe we managed to pull off the insanely challenging task of creating spots that feel epic in scope at the same time they are intensely personal and intimate,” Loeb concludes. “In the process, I think Reiss/Hill showed creative depth and capacity that’s a rare and very special thing.”

Client: Flex Your Power

Spots Title(s): “California,”"Climate,” “Floods,” “Drought,” “Legacy”

First Air Date(s): June 11, 2007 (“Climate,” “California”). Next two spots to Break July 9.

Agency: Brainchild Creative
Asian Agency: Kobayashi Maru Group
Creative Director: Jef Loeb
Art Director: David Swope
Copywriter: Jef Loeb
Agency Producer: Annie Uzdavinis

Production Company: GARTNER
Director: Riess/Hill
DP: John Toon
EP: Rich Carter, Don Block
Producer: Rocky Bice

Editorial: Phoenix Edit Design & Effects
Editor: Bob Frisk
Post/Effects: Phoenix Edit Design & Effects
Flame Artist: John Crossley
EP: Jonathan Hinman

Telecine: Riot! Santa Monica
Colorist: Clark Muller

Music: Stock
Audio Post: One Union Recording
Mixer: Andy Greenberg