Creative Fire

Left to right: Don McNeill of Digital Kitchen, Dave Mehrman of Norton Rubble & Mertz, and Alex Foucre-Stimes of Vitamin. Photo: John Gress

In 1871, when the Great Fire burned Chicago to the ground, up rose the second city. The descriptor is still used today — most famously by Chicago's native-born comedy troupe Second City, which is now in its sixth decade of creativity.

Most recently, in the town that hosted The Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the film industry put Chicago to work on The Dark Knight, Wanted, The Promotion, and more. However, day to day, the city's content creators revolve less around movies and more around advertising.

With Chicago's Leo Burnett fueling the advertising revolution in the 1950s (alongside New York's Bill Bernbach and England's David Ogilvy), the Windy City's agency environment has become a global hub sporting offices for top firms including Bernbach's agency DDB Worldwide, Ogilvy & Mather, and Draftfcb. These giants are the engine for the city's vibrant content-creation community.

The siren song of Hollywood doesn't speak to everyone. Some people go and then come back home. Some use a film-school education to build lives and careers half a continent away from the big white sign that watches over Beachwood Canyon. Any community is ultimately made up of individuals with their own reasons for committing to content creation. While Hollywood's allure draws people from afar, the loyalty of Chicagoans drives a hometown passion that keeps talent local. Here's how three individuals are making it happen in the second city.

Don McNeill is a principal and cofounder of Digital Kitchen, a 6500-square-foot facility in Chicago's River North district, a cozy section of the downtown laden with old warehouses and new condo conversions that stretches along the North branch of the Chicago River. His professional career started in Los Angeles years ago with a company that did Japanese commercials — matching big brands and their massive budgets with actors such as Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. Following that adventure, McNeill made TV shows for NBC Universal.

But in 1997, he wanted to move his family to Chicago, and he got an opportunity with Ogilvy & Mather as a senior partner and executive producer. He quickly found that being in such position, it was paramount to understand the town and quickly evaluate the vendors.

“When I got to Chicago, I was surprised, quite frankly, how much advertising there was, but how few really genuine creative partners there were,” McNeill says. “I'm no historian on this subject — but what happened back in those days as Leo Burnett, J. Walter Thompson, and Ogilvy grew here in town, so did a bunch of editors. These [editors] started their own companies, which when I came along, were really big [editorial] organizations.” It wasn't what McNeill was used to in Los Angeles; he'd worked in smaller boutique places where billable hours were less important than forging creative alliances with clients.

McNeill says he thought he could bring some of that culture to Chicago. In fact, he thought it was necessary to the kind of successful communication that sells messages and products. He saw a wide-open market for adding creative collaboration to production and post, providing value to clients by taking part in the intimate process of creating ads that work.

Thus, shortly after moving to Chicago, McNeill called upon a friend he'd collaborated with while producing creative at Ogilvy: Digital Kitchen, Seattle founder Paul Matthaeus. Together they opened Digital Kitchen's Chicago office in 2001.

It wasn't a traditional edit-suite setup. Rather, the pair created an open floor with editorial booths, design stations, an Autodesk Flame suite, and quiet rooms designed to keep clients from “behind-the-back” supervised sessions. “We began to behave like an ad agency behaves in the sense of: ‘Tell us your creative problem, and let us go solve that, show it to you, pick which one you like, and we'll execute, then you'll come back again,''” McNeill says.

The team at Digital Kitchen Chicago works on a variety of programs including Adobe After Effects, Maxon Cinema 4D, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Apple Final Cut Pro to create film, experiential-design, and motion-graphics projects for its clients.

McNeill says Digital Kitchen is unafraid to cross-pollinate media by putting creative on a cell phone, multiple screens, or something never thought of before. Additionally, McNeill felt it was important to be agnostic to live action, graphics, or editorial solutions — make them all one.

Digital Kitchen, Chicago's first project of notoriety was the main title sequence for Six Feet Under — a project that would ultimately score the company an Emmy Award. Being one of the first companies to merge live action with editorial and design, this early project for McNeill was a proof of concept with the Emmy as validation. Hollywood caught on right away, and Digital Kitchen has completed 40 more title-sequence projects since — including those for Dexter and Nip/Tuck.

But it took almost three years for the ad community to understand Digital Kitchen's bundle of creative services.

“One of the ways we were able to convince Ogilvy/Sears to come to us is we could shoot the products, do motion graphics and editorial,” McNeill says. “That was really rare at that time. You used to go to one guy to direct, a guy to edit, a guy or a company to put motion graphics, and then a company to finish. There used to be four steps, and we could do all of them.”

Since then, McNeill has taken his company, and its expertise, into the next realm of advertising communication doing “experiential” projects for top global clients such as Nike, Budweiser, Target, and Microsoft.

One such instance is a project Target calls its “art installation” in Dallas' Victory Park — where it has four huge monitors that, when converged together, stand 20'×60'.

“Target is one of the top brands with a high standard of creativity, and then to do something that speaks to Target and art — and to do it in that environment was really wild,” McNeill says.

Another example is a Microsoft project for which content was projected on a 65ft. inflatable sphere placed on the South Street Seaport in New York. Photo kiosks were placed around the sphere and thousands of smiling faces were uploaded and projected from four projectors — processed via JavaScript and algorithms — to create live, generative, interactive animation.

Digital Kitchen also does traditional spots in creative ways. After recognizing the technological, interactive, and creative capabilities of McNeill's group, DDB client Budweiser approached the company for product-driven ads beyond a traditional “pour” spot.

One of Vitamin''s specialties is stop motion, for which the company takes stills with cameras such as the Canon EOS-1D Mark III and edits on a Mac G5 running Adobe After Affects.

“Every beer company has done a beer poured into a glass, so they said, ‘How can Digital Kitchen make it cool and do something that is high-tech and speaks to this audience differently?''” McNeill says. “And we came up with what's called the ‘Digital Quality'' campaign where it's an incredible dance between live action, cinematography, high-tech stuff.”

Using the Vision Research Phantom 65 camera on location in Prague, they shot beer.

“We did beer in wild formations; took that footage and put it in digital formats; and added, deleted, and stretched to make the beer magical. They went way beyond expectations,” McNeill says. “We definitely communicated the Budweiser POV of really high-end product attributes with powerful creative.”

Digital Kitchen brought home Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) and Promax|BDA BDA Design awards for its Budweiser work.

Another technically creative campaign was for KeyBank, for which the company took audio from real banking clients and added a wild animation style for visuals — making the spots look like old-school animation using new-school technologies. This style helped create the metaphor that KeyBank was looking to communicate — home grown — by veering away from the “see-and-say” type of advertising, letting the animation fill in the blanks and making the animation part of the dialogue so the viewer can add it all up in their head. The entire project was done with hand-drawn illustrations and modified in Adobe After Effects, Maxon Cinema 4D, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Apple Final Cut Pro.

Now that Digital Kitchen is more established just five years after opening its doors, McNeill looks back on the Chicago scene. “I think Chicago as a whole is slow to adapt and take on new companies. But when you do prove yourself, this town is very loyal,” he says.

See Digital Kitchen's reel at reel-exchange.com/members/e517f1b3/profile.

From Digital Kitchen, catch the CTA Bus 65 on Grand toward the Navy Pier. Just past the world-renowned Magnificent Mile shopping district along Michigan Avenue, you'll find Vitamin — about two blocks east of the Gap. The building also houses Vitamin's sister company Lift and parent company, the Chicago Filmworkers Club.

Chicago native Alex Foucre-Stimes is a creative staffer at Vitamin and a 2007 DePaul Film School graduate. He found DePaul to be a great program, but a young one at the time (his class was the first to have the privilege of all four years in the program). Halfway through Foucre-Stimes' tenure, DePaul added animation. While he didn't graduate with an animation degree per se, he focused on animation at the end.

“When I was at DePaul, I knew I didn't like shooting as much,” Foucre-Stimes says. “Sometimes shooting on set drove me nuts. I wanted to get into animation because you went and did it on your own — in your computer lab.”

The eight-person studio focuses on motion graphics, design, and animation. The company used to do more music video, but it has now turned to more commercial projects — doing work for Leo Burnett, BBDO, Euro RSCG, and other Chicago advertising stalwarts. Foucre-Stimes started interning in August 2007 and became official staff on Jan. 1, 2008.

Some major projects include such clients as Wal-Mart, Nike, Secret, and Michelob, as well as some work for AT&T this past summer. While Vitamin is a very design-oriented company, staff members like the quick turnaround of commercials and are trying to get more into live-action shooting.

The AT&T spots were super-slow-mos of computers smashing against a wall — decimating seven refurbished laptops. To capture the images, they used the Phantom 65 camera. “We'd watch it on the monitor and say, ‘That looked awful.'' But then you watched it back on the Phantom, and it looks incredible,” Foucre-Stimes says.

Another competency of Vitamin is stop motion. For Michelob, the company took raw stills with the Canon EOS-1D Mark III — shooting bursts that the staff would download manually, convert to JPEGs, and make image sequences on set. A usual setup would be a 30in. monitor and a Mac G5 running Adobe After Effects, in which the crew would compile rough cuts for clients to view on set.

“We're really into stop motion right now, so we're looking at a software called Dragon,” Foucre-Stimes says. “It's an amazing program and really convenient for what we're doing. The stop-motion animator that we had on set with a LunchBox — an older stop-motion tool where it basically gives a screengrab on a monitor of what the camera is seeing and you can toggle back and forth between your last screengrab for reference. So this new Dragon software does that all digitally, and it can store a huge amount of backed files.”

The Vitamin team mostly uses After Effects for compositing and Softimage|XSI for 3D, and it tested 2d3 Boujou for motion tracking. The office is switching from G5s to new Intel-based Mac workstations, save the 3D work done on a PC.

With more advanced technology, the team is looking at doing more interactive media work.

“The vibe here is that if we can do web things, they get pumped out a lot quicker and they're a lot easier deliverables,” Foucre-Stimes says. “We're just giving QuickTimes. For AT&T, we shrank everything down to 400×300 movies for streaming. It's easier than sending your client beta tape or a full-res TIF sequence.”

Vitamin's interactive deliverables are usually H.264 files, which are compressed using Autodesk Cleaner or QuickTime.

Foucre-Stimes says he is fully aware of the opportunities for content creators in places such as Los Angeles or New York — he has a friend who worked for Michael Mann's Public Enemies and now Heroes — but he also understands the fierce competition in those cities, which is something he's not quite interested in.

“Making a jump to another city, personally for me, isn't something I really want to do,” Foucre-Stimes says. “Here, I've got a small company that's looking out for me. I'm getting mentored and learning how agency business works, and it's very toned-back here. Chicago is my home, and I've got a lot invested here.”

As does Vitamin, having the director from Wisconsin and another principal creative from Indiana. Neither is looking to transition to New York or Los Angeles — they're making it happen in Chicago.

See Vitamin's reel at reel-exchange.com/members/4a4bf0b7/profile.

From downtown, take the Eisenhower Expressway to Oak Brook — the land of malls and golf links — and you'll find Dave Mehrman. Mehrman is a video editor for the advertising agency Norton Rubble & Mertz, a Chicago-area firm set in a 30-story skyscraper in the 'burbs (which elicits great city views) whose clients include several medical associations, Hollister, Pabst Brewing, and Siemens.

Mehrman also grew up in Chicago, and he graduated from the film program at Columbia College. While a lot of people at his school aspired to go to Los Angeles or New York, he wanted to stay.

“Before and during school, I had done various independent productions, 5-minute profiles on hip-hop artists, and filmed various shows and concerts,” Mehrman says. “So after school, I decided to see if I could continue making it here.”

A self-proclaimed Apple geek, Mehrman worked at the Apple store in downtown Chicago during school as the film/video specialist, doing presentations and workshops on Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio. HDV was just starting at that point, and Final Cut was upgrading. Not only was he able to learn the applications intensively, but he also became certified in both Final Cut Pro and Shake, which he calls “a nice added bonus.”

Post graduation, Mehrman got further experience working as an assistant cable producer at a local school district for its cable channel and other various productions. He even did freelance work on a web commercial for Bike Chicago, which does bike rentals at places such as Navy Pier and Millennium Park as well as weddings to help out with extra money.

His extensive home setup includes a PowerMac G5 with Final Cut Pro, Shake, and the Adobe CS3 Master Suite plus DV production equipment, a Sony DSR-PD150, and a small RAID. He also has a Mac laptop for mobile editing. Beyond that, he has acquired skills on Avid systems and even Media 100. This all helped him transition to working for Norton Rubble & Mertz.

“I had an opportunity to do some freelance editing [for the agency] and after the freelance, to come in full time,” Mehrman says. Since then, he's been working on corporate projects, editing commercials for air or websites, and creating motion graphics. “Even though we've brought it inhouse here, we still do work with other companies and post houses as we don't have enough time to do it all ourselves. And at times, there are some graphic designers whose work we like and want to work with them; it adds variety to our projects.”

Those projects are many and vast in scale for a smaller agency with global clients — sometimes creating content for tradeshows, digital signage, and motion graphics for billboards. He's even done kiosks with video playback — shooting high definition with a greenscreen, then exporting to Flash for the kiosk. Now he's doing more web video and videos to place in PowerPoint presentations.

Having a video editor or motion graphics artist full-time at an agency offers flexibility and even some cost savings as technology has become more accessible, providing opportunity to offer more for the company's clients.

In his dimly lit editing suite — complete with client seating and a big coffee table — is an eight-core Mac Pro with 10GB RAM running primarily Final Cut Studio and After Effects. He has a CalDigit S2VR HD RAID, but the agency also has an Apple Xraid for archival purposes as well as more permanent storage on serial ATA hard drives and drive sleds.

Cameras are usually rented — Panasonic's AG-HVX200 or, more recently, the AG-HPX500 using the new AVC-Intra codec, which the company ingested to Apple ProRes 422.

“We do a lot of [Panasonic] P2 workflow,” Mehrman says. “Shooting with those cards, we'll bring a laptop along to the set and transfer the files right there. If we need to, we can open the laptop and check the footage out. And we're able to edit DVCPRO HD in native full resolution, which is pretty nice to have the flexibility to see in full res the whole time.”

But when the team is shooting high def, and future-proofing the footage, their deliverables need to be downconverted. Mehrman does a lot of that encoding using Apple Compressor's Flash video encoder as well as tools built into his editing softwares. “I find it's good to do multipass [encoding], compress it in stages,” Mehrman says. “That produces a real good quality, instead of going from high res all the way down to delivery format.”

As for the rest of the content-creation community in Chicago, particularly the filmmaker scene, it's still in a growth process. “I know the movie Chicago wasn't even shot in Chicago,” Mehrman says. But recently, Illinois — as with many other states — has passed tax-incentive legislation to lure filmmaking to the second city. Mehrman also points out the local indie scene and the latest wave of film grads from Columbia College.

“It seems like there's a lot more artists and filmmakers wanting to stay and make Chicago their home for productions,” Mehrman says. “A lot more seems to be happening with shorts, and I notice more of a community. With the new tax breaks and more films coming to Chicago to shoot, I've definitely noticed more going on than before.”

But even with Chicago's production community expanding, there's always that lure of Hollywood.

“I kind of wonder what it would be like in L.A. for a little bit,” Mehrman says. “I know the competition is significantly harder, from what I hear, but on the same token, there is a lot more opportunity out there. Who knows where my future will end up? But I'm a Chicagoan at heart — I have a big connection to my city.”

See Mehrman's reel at reel-exchange.com/members/0aa305cc/profile.

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