The on-call journalist

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Stephen Kertis

We focus on documentary production and documentary styled creative strategy and delivery. When we approach marketing this means we always focus on real stories about real things. It is a novel approach by most standards, but we are seeing real success stories from our clients.

Since we are not your typical agency or production company it is always exciting when we get calls to partner up with some of the big guns in the broadcast video industry. In the last month we have been called on to do exciting work for the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC and most recently ABC News .

We were excited to hear from 20/20 about a segment being produced in Kentucky. 20/20 has been a major player in producing in-depth journalistic news stories for decades. Even in an era of shorter, faster, and cheaper the folks at 20/20 still produces stories that take months.

I don’t want to give anything away until after the package airs, but it was great to be a part of a top-notch crew.  We will be sure to update when the show airs!

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Visiting the Ham Lady

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Casey Chalmers

Last week, Brett and I took a trip to Princeton, Ky., to shoot with Nancy Newsom, a.k.a.: the Ham Lady. We captured some great images around her shop, but were most excited to visit her ham house, the shack where she smokes and ages her hams — her temple of slow-motion alchemy.

She drove us out to a bare, squat, concrete lair; its air thick with the musky presence of age and decay. Shooting in this murky, clammy gallery, we struggled with the darkness. To the naked eye, this place was a banquet of texture and color, but with one lonely, naked light bulb buzzing in the rafters, producing sharp images was tricky.

That all changed when the Ham Lady got busy with her cigarette lighter and a hefty lattice of woodblocks and kindling. While Nancy patiently roosted over a deep fire pit roughly the size of a wash bucket, a warm bloom of light stretched across her face and into the smudgy corners of the room. As the glow filled the space with a magical animation, the clean, pleasant smoke went to work on the thousands of hams dangling from the beams above. Nancy decided to wait outside while we shot our video. She occasionally cracked open the door to peek at the fire’s progress, each time bathing the space in a sharp, light blue, back-lighting the fat smoke plumes. Then she’d quickly shut the door, casting us back into the soft, hypnotic shimmer.

Brett and I stayed low, hunched around the fire, shooting through the elegant flames, and up into the rising channels of smoke encircling the pork. It looked otherworldly, and I was reminded of the curious and stealthy gardens of unhatched eggs in the Alien films.

The hams will continue lounging in their nets for somewhere between a year and 18 months, each one a moldy vessel, a tasty time capsule. Eventually, they will be sold to local fans at her downtown Princeton market, Col. Bill Newsom’s Aged Kentucky Country Ham and specialty restaurants around the country.

Restaurants:

www.garageonmarket.com/site/

www.hogandrocks.com/about/purveyors/

www.huskrestaurant.com

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Festival of Faiths: Sacred Air

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Stephen Kertis

It started with a very simple question: How do we get people curious about the Festival of Faiths?  We have worked with the Festival of Faiths for the last couple of years, and as with any of our clients, we wanted to push the boundaries of how they are perceived. This year’s theme is Sacred Air, which follows the environmental focus of previous years.

We know people interested in the festival come from a wide demographic. We wanted to create something that would visually deliver the tagline for this year’s festival.

“Prepare to be blown away!”

It is straight to the point and really delivers some energy.  It is intriguing, yet safe. We know that there is a wide audience for the Festival of Faiths, and we wanted everyone to know the theme of the 16th annual festival.  It is a tall order to serve up with a single targeted video, so we thought that two teasers might do the trick.

The first video is an animation that is both easy to grasp and modern in design.  A simple message:

Air is all around us.  We are going to meet and talk about its importance in November, and we want you there.

The second video is a bit more abstract and geared toward a younger demographic. It is meant to build anticipation that culminates in an unveiling of our call to action.

We are excited to be partnering again this year with the Festival of Faiths.  I am sure we will have more to share with you as it progresses.  Until then, check out www.festivaloffaiths.org to find out more.

 

16th Annual Festival of Faiths

Nov. 2nd – 7th, 2011

 

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Old photos find new life

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Brett Marshall

Last week we had the privilege of collaborating with Síofra Rucker at Yew Dell Gardens on an installation of old photographs they had from the farm. The images were to be displayed for a fundraising dinner where attendees got a chance to share a meal with the farmers who grew the food they were eating. Our good buddy Joey Wilkinson at Murphy’s did an excellent job with the prints. The mats were all cut to size for each print. Who knew cutting mats was so time consuming. I think the end product was well worth the time put in though. After borrowing a couple of old barn doors from Maggie Keith at Foxhollow Farm I was ready to go to work with hammer and nail to complete the layout.

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College football recruiting is humming

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Kertis Creative

The college football season is still more than a month away but coaches have turned their attention to next year’s crop of athletes.

Recently Kertis Creative traveled with the staff of CatsIllustrated.com, part of Yahoo! Sports’ Rivals network, and produced this profile piece on a high school player near Elizabethtown, Ky.

Going in we wanted to mix drama with action and picked different tools to tell the story: sweeping wide angles using a Pocket Dolly and Lumix GH2 camera and handheld gritty close ups using the Red Rock Micro rig with a 5D Mark II camera. Then we chose the music: cinematic pomp followed by flavorful hip-hop beats.

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Kertis Creative partners with Rivals.com

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Kertis Creative

Gay Talese entered the world of sportswriting because, “There were so many fine fiction writers, it seemed to me, and not enough nonfiction writers who had mastered the art of storytelling, and so it was my goal to become one of these,” he writes in the introduction to The Silent Season of a Hero, an anthology of Talese’s sports journalism. A 1966 Esquire piece on Joe DiMaggio is considered a sportswriting classic.

Sports is full of emotion, drama, liars, cheats and adversity. This is why we have jumped into the sports game. Yahoo! Sports’ college sports product, Rivals.com, covers sports from its recruiting foundations to national championships. We have partnered with Rivals’ University of Kentucky site, Cats Illustrated, to produce multimedia content surrounding Wildcats sports.

This weekend we traveled to the University of Virginia to help Rivals writer Steve Jones cover the National Basketball Players Association Top 100 Camp, which draws the top high school players from around the nation, many who are considering coming to UK. We will help provide content for basketball and football and other big news coming from Lexington. There are a slew of stories in Kentucky sports and we are excited to tell them.

(Photo: Oakland, Calif., forward Brandon Ashley has scholarship offers from Connecticut, Kentucky, Kansas and UCLA. By Derek Poore | Kertis Creative)
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IBM: 100 years later

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Kertis Creative

IBM corp

Apple rebooted itself again this month with iCloud, announcing to the world that it wants to be a major player in the cloud computing world.

But one company that the average tech consumer doesn’t think about often has long been investing in the cloud: IBM. The company’s 100th anniversary is June 16 and while “Big Blue” only makes headlines when its supercomputers win TV’s “Jeopardy,” the company has survived 100 years of the greatest technological advances in human history not by selling technology, but by selling service.

“IBM is not a technology company, but a company solving business problems using technology,” says George Colony, chief executive of Forrester Research, in this week’s issue of The Economist. IBM is similar to Apple in that its business model can adapt to new technologies and provide a service to customers. Apple launched as a personal computer company. Now it sells mobile devices powered by the wide availability of the Web. It’s not beholden to one piece of software or device.

This is similar to how advertising, documentary producers and journalists tell stories. Newspapers and books gave way to films, television and now interactivity: the Web, social networking, gaming and other multimedia. Storytelling is powerful no matter what platform it stands on. Everything from human rights abuses to organic tea can be explored with the emotion of storytelling. Newspapers unfortunately long subscribed to the idea that it sold a printed product. It only recently realized it sold journalism: its stories could be told in print, on a computer, an iPad or Android phone. Journalism will survive because it can be implemented on numerous platforms. If printed newspapers die, journalism will survive.

“IBM, 100 years after its incorporation, appears to be fairly well in control of its destiny,” The Economist writes. “From the beginning, as a maker of complex machines, IBM had no choice but to explain its products to its customers and thus to develop a strong understanding of their business requirements. … Over time these relationships became IBM’s most important platform.”

Here’s to another 100 years of connecting with people.

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Be A Shield

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Brett Marshall

I recently finished a portrait series for the Salvation Army for their Be A Shield campaign. The goal was to give recognition to some of folks who volunteer their time in hopes of inspiring others to do the same. My personal goal was to keep the lighting to a minimum to keep from drawing attention away from the volunteers.

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Apple, Hollywood reboot again

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Kertis Creative

Media reports say that Steve Jobs will return from his medical leave June 6 and launch Apple’s new iCloud music service at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, which will allow users to stream their music library to their computer, laptop or mobile device anywhere they can get Internet access.

For the better part of a decade, June has meant one thing for Apple: rebooting. The iPhone was released in June. The three revisions after it were also announced in consecutive summers. Apple is expected to also announce its latest upgrade to the iOS that powers iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches. It will also announce the latest revision of OS X: Lion.

Apple has had to reinvent itself several times since it made waves with the Macintosh computer in the 1980s. After the technology industry left it for dead in the 1990s, Jobs mounted a comeback to launch the iPod, which helped lead Apple back to the top of the tech world.

How do you reinvent yourself? How does your organization do the same? Hollywood has refreshed numerous film franchises in the first 10 years of this century. June through the end of the 2011 will be no different and it could influence what movies are released for years to come. There are reboots like Green Lantern, Winnie the Pooh, Captain America and The Smurfs. There are also sequels like the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film, the last Harry Potter installment and another Transformers flick. In the case of Disney’s longtime super-franchise about the Hundred-Acre Wood, Disney enlisted Pixar king John Lasseter to executive produce, yet returns to its hand-drawn animation roots.

Your community is always craving something new. Social media can get stale even after a few minutes. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time, and your ideas can suck, that’s OK too. But don’t stop creating. Former President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

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The resume is dead: long live the resume

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Kertis Creative

The creative digital world has afforded employers the opportunity to instantly see and connect with potential employees. The same is true for creative businesses and their prospective clients. In an always-on, social world, people doing business want to connect with their communities. What has been lost in this uber geeky, smartphone-connected world? The traditional resume.

“The resume is on the out, and the bio is on the rise. People work with people they can relate to and identify with. Trust comes from personal disclosure,” writes Michael Margolis at Behance, a marketing and portfolio site for creative professionals.

Instead, he argues, we should be telling our story. It makes us human. It reduces corporate speak and technical jargon and lets people connect on a more personal level. It builds trust, promotes a professional’s best and latest work, and gives you a better chance of getting hired.

What do you think? Is the resume dead?

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