Stu Wilson

Breaking from the traditional production company mold, POC is not content to maintain a roster of directorial talent; rather, it nurtures its artists through the prism of technology. POC’s communal, collaborative environment is home to gifted writers, directors, visual effects artists, coders and designers, operating under the aegis of resourceful producers. “Proof of Concept’s model speaks not only to the changing landscape of advertising and promotion but to an enduring notion that rules are made to be broken,” said Wilson, “The best ideas require pushing the envelope if they’re to be realized. That’s where POC comes in.”

The congregation of talent at Proof of Concept is comprised of Creative Directors Bob Rickert + Lonnie Weiss; Directors Josh Soskin, Justin Giritlian, Neel Upadhye, and POC Interactive; Editors Dave Gallegos and Rick Lobo; Colorist John Zaik; Design/VFX duo The Brothers Fanton; VFX + Animation Artist Pasha Ivanoff and the stellar POC Interactive Team.

Wilson’s creativity and passion for the art of visual storytelling have led to the production of numerous award-winning campaigns. He has led multidisciplinary teams in campaigns for agencies such as DDB Chicago, Saatchi, JWT, TBWA Chiat/Day and Digitas, delivering content for clients as diverse as Ford, Toyota, Nissan, GM, Coors, PlayStation, Pioneer, Seadoo, Mattel, Macy’s, Petco, Elmers, and Dupont. He founded production company Right Brain Media, Inc. (RBM) in 1995, and in 2007 immersed himself in Digital Production, Social Media and Interactive Experiential marketing via Image Lab, Inc. Wilson believes the combination of seasoned veterans and determined young innovators “is a key component in bringing even the most challenging multi-media and interactive productions to fruition.”

Raffi Kryszek

Kryszek is quickly becoming one of the entertainment industry’s most watched young producers. Paramount Pictures recently acquired screen rights to the Colleen Houck novel, “Tiger’s Curse,” which Kryszek will produce under his recently created Ineffable Pictures banner along with Mary Parent through Disruption Entertainment. Ineffable Pictures was established to oversee long-form theatrical content from inception through distribution. In addition to producing, “Fox Legacy”, which airs on the Fox Movie Channel,  Kryszek received his first Emmy nomination this year, as producer of the network’s original program “Writer’s Draft.”

“It’s our goal at Proof of Concept to establish a firm foundation of trust in the union between our people and the ideas of agencies, labels, and brands,” noted Kryszek, who maintains Clifton Production Services, the production and post solutions company he founded in 2007, as a sister entity to POC. “Innovation and experimentation are integral to our culture. We respect our audience and we pour a ton of passion and knowledge into the creation of transformative content that’s worthy of their attention.”

Thinking beyond traditional marketing platforms, POC will create content for broadcast as well as online rich media, mobile applications and other interactive platforms, devising solutions to help brands reach consumers in more compelling and unique ways.

About the Talent:

The POC talent roster is comprised of:

Creative Directors Bob Rickert + Lonnie Weiss, whose credits include the launch of the Dell XT Notepad, and the rebranding and relaunch of Century Link and Mercy Health Care. Bob Rickert comes to POC after having been at TBWA/Chiat Day, David and Goliath, Hal Riney and Partners and Weiden Kennedy;

Director Josh Soskin, who has helmed spot projects for Windows, Vitamin Water, Starbucks, and Pepsi; he began his directing career in the documentary world where he produced and directed hundreds of short docs for Current TV;

Justin Giritlian, Director of Xbox 360’s Dance Central Video, who also helmed a short Documentary for Fertility Miracles and is developing a 3D short film that will come pre-shipped with 3D Televisions; he founded a trans-media production studio to service his client Overstock.com and sold that company prior to joining POC;

Director Neel Upadhye, whose spot credits include projects for Electronic Arts, Coca Cola, Nike, Fox Searchlight, GameStop and Dragon Age 2; additionally, his Sci-Fi live action trailer for the video game “Mass Effect 3″ premiered at the Orpheum theater in Los Angeles at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo. His credits also include the world premiere video for 30 Seconds to Mars “This Is War,” as well as the short film “Jay & Seth vs. The Apocalypse” (starring Seth Rogen) which later sold to Mandate Pictures. He comes to POC from EA Games;

Colorist John Ziak, who most recently worked with JJ Abrams on 2011’s “Super 8”; his credits also include the first five years of iPhone’s broadcast campaign and Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign; he comes over from CO3;

Editor Dave Gallegos, who has edited “FOX Legacy with Tom Rothman” for the FOX Movie Channel, and cut the sci-fi short  “Incident on Highway 73″ (www.incidentonhighway73.com), on which he also served as post production supervisor; Dave moves to POC from Clifton Post;

Rick Lobo, who for more than a decade has been a Senior Editor at various post houses in Los Angeles. A two-time AICE award-winner for his comedy work, Rick edited the acclaimed documentary “Confessions of a Superhero” and has cut spot projects for Carl’s Jr., At&T, Honda, Acura, McDonalds and many more;

Design/VFX duo The Brothers Fanton, who have lent their talents to TV shows such as the Kennedy Center Honors on CBS (Visual Effects and Opening Title Sequence) and Christmas in Washington on TNT (Opening Title Sequence); The Fantons come to POC from Bentlight Digital;

and Animation Artist Pasha Ivanoff, who is currently working on 3D features “Men in Black III” and “The Amazing Spider-Man”; Pasha is also at work on the full-length animated feature “Hotel Transylvania”. Recent credits include: “Avatar”, “2012″, “Pirates of Caribbean,” “Battle: LA”, “Underworld”, “X-Men”, “Gullivers Travels”, “Knight and Day”,“The Book Of Eli”, and “Skyline”; he began as digital creature animator and character technical director at New York based Blue Sky Studios/20th Century Fox, and at Pacific Data Images/Dreamworks Animation, where he helped develop the forthcoming record shattering box office smash movie “Shrek 2” which become one of the most profitable animated movie of all times. In 2004 “Shrek 2” won the first ever Academy Award For Best Animated Feature, beating Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron.

Created via Deutsch, the endearing spot features a little kid running around his home, desperately trying to use the force while dressed up as a pint-sized Darth Vader. It’s not until his dad returns home, driving the new 2012 Passat, that he harnesses the power of the “The Force” — thanks to a little help from dad and the VW’s remote-starting capabilities.

TIME declared the spot “an absolute winner, tying in not only to a pop-culture mythology that now has a hold on several generations, but to the universal longing of children for superpowers — which is not unrelated to the inner longings that make people choose cars. The Force is strong in this one.”

Credits:
Agency: Deutsch
Group Creative Director/ Copywriter: Eric Springer
Group Creative Director/ Art Director: Michael Kadin
Copywriter: David Povill
Art Director: Ryan McGlaughin
EVP Director of Integrated Production: Vic Polumbo
EVP Director of Broadcast Production: Victoria Guenier
Senior Producer: Jim Haight
Associate Producer: Brooke Yaussi

Production Company: Park Pictures
Director: Lance Accord
Producer: Pat Frazier

Editorial Company: Union Editorial
Editor: Jim Haygood
Assistant Editor: Dylan Fishein
Executive Producer: Megan Dahlman
Executive Producer: Michael Raimondi

Final Transfer: Stefan Sonnenfeld, CO3

Online: resolution la
Online Editor: Amir Qureshi

Mix: Mark Meyuhas, Lime Studios

For this spot, Sugar Film Production went all out. “It was a big undertaking, since we had so much content to cover,” says Director. Chris Smith. “It was a nice, long, three-day shoot.” To get all the footage they needed, Sugar employed 8 different cameras, including 3 smaller, more maneuverable digital cameras that were fixed to the trucks’ undercarriages. The footage was shot in Detroit and at a ranch outside of Los Angeles. Sugar Film Production made the process as painless as possible for the client. “We put a premium on painlessness,” says Executive Producer Tony Miglini. “Next to delivering great work, it’s a core tenant of Sugar’s professional philosophy. We’re not just a busy company,” he points out, “we’re busy because we have great relationships.”

Their work with Richards Group is a testament to that relationship-building. “The client was asking for an ambitious amount of footage, on a very aggressive schedule. Our first choice was Sugar and Chris Smith,” says Mike LaTour, Art Director at Richards. “Having worked with them on numerous projects in the past we knew they’d nail everything the client wanted, and then some. Needless to say, they killed it.” Ally Tarter, Broadcast Producer at Richards adds, “It’s awesome to hear our client say that their footage of the trucks is the best they’ve ever seen.” The groups have worked together on two other Dodge ads, as well as recent spots for Prestone, Motel 6, and grocer HEB. Sugar’s approach to client relationships clearly pays off. 2010 marked a banner year for Sugar Film Production and the fourth quarter was its most profitable yet.

“A lot of factors contributed to 2010 being a great year, including bringing in some amazing new people.” concludes Miglini. “And we pride ourselves on our seamless productions, and in the end maybe it’s as simple as that.”

• Shots – Smarties 08.10
• SourceEcreative – TWC Films: Wide Awake, With a Little help from Starbucks 07.10
• Cannes Lions Dailies – North American Film Production 06.10
• Adweek – Starbucks “Mom” 06.10
• SourceEcreative – TWC adds a new EP and a sextet of directors 05.10
• LA Times Blog - Black & Decker – shoot location published 05.10
• Screen - Newcaslte wins SOTD on Favourite website awards 04.10
• Commarts – Newcaslte Brown Ale 04.10
• FWA – Newcaslte Brown Ale – Favourite Website Awards “Site of the Day” 04.10
• Screen – In the Spotlight 04.10
• Boards – People moves 03.10
• Shots – TWC Films evolve 03.10
• Shoot – TWC Lands Six Directors 03.10
• The Hollywood Reporter – A Somewhat Gentle Man — Film Review 02.10
• indieWIRE – A Somewhat Gentle Man 02.10
• Reuters – Skarsgard shines as “A Somewhat Gentle Man” 02.10
• Variety – A Somewhat Gentle Man Movie Review 02.10
• Celebrifi – Berlinale 2010: A dopey Stellan Skarsgård stars in A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN (En ganske snill mann) trailer 02.10
• Norwegian Film Institute – A Somewhat Gentle Man from Norway eyes Berlin’s Golden Bear 01.10

Transvestite Bums, Chinese Donut Shops, and the Dogs of Commercial War

“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