Economic ownership is not that only way that a corporation mimics a person. Corporations also have the power to speak and listen. They have histories, contemplate the future, and yes, they actually have personalities as well.
As a communicator tasked with creating corporate or institutional media productions, I often find myself getting to know intensely interesting, very inspiring corporate personalities ... and looking for ways to bring an authentic institutional character to the screen.
This is often difficult, because it takes a certain amount of poise and objectivity to balance the many different personal outlooks on institutional ethos which may come my way as the project evolves. Like the blind men describing the elephant, a full picture often emerges only when executives and salespeople and research engineers and customers all contribute their perspectives of an enterprise.
Equally important to understanding the subject, is empathizing with the audience. What opinions are they bringing to the table? What do they care about, and what bridges must be built in order for them to cross to the same side of the river as the corporate perspective? These are the challenges which I love to grapple with as I help you tell your story.
This production was exciting to produce for several personal reasons. My childhood dream was to be a physicist, and to attend MIT. Somewhere in high school the arts won out in my mind, and I spent a lot more time in music and photography than the sciences. But my interest in science has always informed my communication efforts on technical subjects.
When the possibility of competing for this business arose, I found myself up against a number of very formidable DC production companies, with oodles of experience doing persuasive presentations for government agencies, defense contractors, and NGOs. I was a smaller firm, with the disadvantage of being located in Ohio. When my written proposal made the short list, I decided to engage the client in a discussion of his agency struggles, and what he hoped the video would say to his target audiences. It turned out that mine was the last presentation, and I could tell the guys before me had been really impressive. They had showed up with three or four people, and submitted a spec treatment with the entire creative plan mapped out, including graphic themes. The executive director of AIP, Marc Brodsky, told me later that he was very impressed with their treatment, and thought it was on target.
So I guess it was fortuitous for me that I went with my gut, and didn't try to show a lot of samples of my work, or sell myself. Instead, I drew Marc and his associates into a discussion. I did what I do best, which is to ask open-ended questions, be curious and passionate about finding "the story". It didn't take long for a rapport to develop, and we ended up spending two full hours in an intense discussion of their business and how best to communicate its dynamic history and future.
I think Marc agonized over the decision, but in the end it's my perception that in spite of the small size of my company, he trusted me to listen to him, and to let the content of the piece evolve as we unearthed the golden nuggets in each person's interview and each location's visuals. As with so many of the opportunities that have come my way, I was lucky.
One of the evolutionary adaptations we made during the course of filming was to bring more youth and energy into the mix. After about two days of interviewing octagenarian spokesmen from the early days of AIP, I told Marc that simply interviewing the main leaders of AIP from the past 75 years would not portray the energy and forward-thinking spirit of this very young-at-heart agency. I asked him to consider allowing me to interview college students for the project, and also to portray children being taught physics. He kindly allowed me to schedule hand-picked students who he had flown in for the shooting we still had to do in New York and San Diego... and those additions made a huge impact on the emotional content of the piece. We also shot small children in the AIP day care facilities, and were fortunate enough to get material I could use to tell a story of physics starting with the questions and wonder of the youngest children.
One of the most thrilling days for me personally was the trip to Boston, where we got to interview Norman Ramsey in his home. Dr. Ramsey won the Nobel prize for discovering that extremely accurate atomic clocks could be based on the spin of electrons. From this discovery, we all enjoy the GPS and MRI technologies. After we left Dr. Ramsey, we went to MIT where we interviewed and shot B-roll of the research efforts of Dr. Mildred Dresselhaus, an AIP board member and expert on carbon microfibers. Her energy, and the playful exuberance of her grad students, added greatly to the personality and emotion of the ending of the piece.
By far the most thrilling part of the shoot for me was the San Diego leg. There we interviewed Dr. Frederick Seitz, who at 96 was still lucid and just starting work on another book on the history of physics. Then we went to Mount Palomar, where Cal Tech was kind enough to let us film during their busy research hours from sunset into the darkness. They agreed to rotate the massive dome on cue, so that I could get a timelapse shot of the dome turning and doors opening just after sunset. I shot that scene with three cameras at once. Awesome! The whole trip was capped off by a trip to the Scripps Oceanographic Institution ... harking back to my junior-high dream of being an oceanographer!
All in all, I am very proud of the way this project came together. It was definitely a tightly nuanced message, requiring both left-brain and right-brain thinking in order to find the right balance. As I was working on it, I found myself drawn to the wave action of the oceans as a metaphor for the many energy forms that physics describes and harnesses. This visual metaphor of the wave action became, I think,a strong unifying element, and helps to bring an artistic simplicity to what could be a mishmash of complex technical subjects. I gathered footage for this visual theme on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and found a great way to tie it together in the editing process. The sine wave metaphor also provided a graphic linkage for the recap of physics discoveries just before the ending segment.
Nestle, Carnation and Drumstick are three ice cream companies that came together in the 1990s under Nestle ownership.
As the multinational player rivalling Unilever, Nestle wanted to gain manufacturing capacity — which the Carnation business gave them. (Carnation's Bakersfield plant was the largest ice cream factory in the world).
And they wanted to add ice cream brands and brand marketing experience, which the Drumstick acquisition gave them. (The Drumstick, Flintstones pushups, and the experience to turn Nestle's own candy brands, Crunch and Butterfinger, into ice cream novelty gold).
Two of the three companies had not been profitable in years. Carnation was distressed; Nestle had been in growth mode, and only Drumstick had consistently been profitable. So Nestle put the Drumstick management in charge of the marketing and top C-level offices of the company. This gave me the opportunity to see first hand what was happening as the three very different corporate cultures began to clash a bit.
A few months after the merger, I suggested to the President that a video could help the employees understand each other better. He asked for a proposal so in researching the history of the three firms I suggested that we tell the story of the birth of all three companies, define the corporate cultures of each, and then show how all three are coming together in a corporate team approach that capitalized on the strengths of all three: the manufacturing/quality traditions of Nestle, the sales/merchandising strengths of Carnation, and the creative product innovation and marketing savvy of Drumstick.
He bought the idea, so in 1992 I went to Switzerland to shoot a dramatization of the birth of Nestle, then came back to Ohio to shoot the birth of Carnation (standing in for northern Washington State). This exerpt covers the first portion of each of those stories, and the remaining 14 minutes of the piece wove those stories together with contemporary footage shot in Bakersfield, Frankfort, Paris, Vevey, and Bern. The final presentation was given to all the company employees.
This production was shot on 16mm film with Owen Kindig serving as writer/director, Jeff Barklage as DP of the European shooting and birth of Drumstick segments, Owen Kindig as DP/ camera operator of the birth of Carnation and contemporary US segments.
The cast was selected from Nestle employees who are active in community theatre in Vevey.
This 1987 video for Digital Equipment Corporation turned out to be prescient in its insight into the changes in technology that we now know as Web 2.0 and the Social Media revolution.
Ken Olsen had hand-picked 100 top managers from Digital to spend a year without other duties, evaluating the future of the computer industry. I had the good fortune of being selected by the company to be their video vendor for this project, tasked with bringing their message before the international DEC sales force.
It turned out to be an exciting collaborative effort, as I went home for a week and convened some of my creative colleagues to brainstorm ways of getting this message across with appropriate emotion and clarity. Walt Adamkosky and Jim Vutech were among the outstanding minds that contributed to the concepts for this treatment. It was Walt who suggested "End of the World".
I think that in terms of articulating change a decade before it was destined to happen, this script is quite unusual. Phrases like "let the buyer beware" and "narrowcast instead of broadcast" had not yet entered the popular lexicon. The visual idea of the baby, playing with blocks, and the linkage with that to the Digital block-letters logo, were also quite appropos, in my view.
When I came back to New York and presented this script to the future-vision committee, they loved it. For me it was a pivotal personal lesson in the niche which I feel best qualified to fill: deep listening to another's story, then articulating their story with passion and authenticity.
We decided to shoot in Columbus because of the cost of studio space in New York. I had the privilege of speaking with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and David Frost before we decided to select E.G. Marshall as our spokesman.
The goal of this presentation was to spark discussion and foment discomfort among the high-flying Digital salesforce. My script actually calls part of the corporate names of DEC and IBM -- "Equipment" and "Machines" -- an outmoded vision. It was hoped the Consultant Area Support Teams which the "future vision" committee organized would begin a shift in emphasis from hardware ("boxes filled with ticking technology") to software services and business consulting.
Uncannily, it took exactly 10 years for the troubles this video predicted to hit the fan. In some respects the company had made the transition successfully. By the time Compaq bought DEC in 1998, it was primarily for their expertise in software services and consulting that the company spent $9.6 billion -- "the largest acquisition in the history of the computer industry" -- to purchase Digital. Alpha 64-bit chip technology and high-end mainframes were only of secondary interest to Compaq.
But I think human nature was what got in the way of Digital's transformation in time to prevent the weakness that led to their takeover.
Here's a newsclip from 1998 which describes the merger:
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n2204_v44/ai_20211658/
For this production I licensed a great deal of cool footage from Archive Films to dramatize how the industrial-revolution model of the computer industry had become outmoded. A number of shots from Metropolis by Fritz Lang made it into this cut, along with some old IBM and AT&T marketing videos.
It was difficult at the time to find the authentic "human" images I wanted to illustrate how high tech was rapidly being replaced by high touch. I tried to get long shots that focused on people being people, communicating with each other. I focused on hands, eyes, expressions; and attempted to make the video look more filmic than was common at the time.
One ominous moment for me, in hindsight, occurs when we see a shot of the World Trade Towers while we hear the line, "It is the end of business as usual." I shudder every time I see it.
My friend Todd Miller, who was the studio manager for SOS Productions at the time of this shoot, deserves kudos for the excellent job he did designing and building the oversize children's blocks that I requested for the closing visual on SOS's stage, where we shot the production. He also built the arched doorway and window-frame which I had sketched in the storyboards for this project.
Thanks, also to Jeff Scheiman, the owner of SOS, for taking an interest in the project and helping shepherd it through his facility. It all happened at a time when I was really just learning the video medium, and Jeff's editorial suggestions were especially valuable.
It's hard to remember now that common effects like morphs had not yet been invented when this production took place! I wanted what we now call a morph to transition a robot to E.G. Marshall's face, but all we could do was a series of overlapping dissolves. At the time even slide show technology had a better morphing solution, by allowing multiple projectors to be overlap their images at one time!
The entire production was shot on 1-inch video tape -- including the location footage at Digital NYC offices and on the streets of New York. It took two grips to carry all those big decks and batteries!
While the pacing and visualization dates this video when we view it today, at the time it was actually a pretty progressive piece of work, and the chance to be let in on the inner sanctum of the computer industry at that pivotal time was an incredible professional opportunity which I treasure to this day.
