If you’ve only thought of Hitachi as a TV maker, think again. That’s the message behind Hitachi’s latest branding campaign, a major departure from the core product-driven campaigns of the past. Confronted by a world dominated by social networking sites and user-generated content, Hitachi decided instead to illustrate how it is transforming the lives of customers and end users across a variety of industries in their own words with True Stories, a series of documentary short films on the Web.
In the first of five films, each five minutes long, on www.hitachi.com/truestories, Small Town Oregon Logs On, viewers see what happens when Hitachi fiber-to-the-home technology is used to connect the remote coastal town of Bandon to the country’s fastest communication network. A fisherman, artist, skateboarder, among others, share how their lives are changing for the better thanks to Hitachi. Another film, Hope in Houston, is about a cancer patient who flies himself to Houston for treatment sessions involving Hitachi’s new proton beam therapy system installed at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The films, conceived and developed with McCann Erickson, San Francisco, were directed by Matt Ogens of bicoastal HKM. The freedom and collaboration involved in this project stood out the most for the director. The documentary style approach required having no scripts and a different type of casting than spot work.
“We had a local coordinator and he would just sort of go around town taking pictures and videos of towns just finding interesting characters for me,” explained Ogens. “Then I would go to those cities–a lot earlier than I would for an out of town commercial–just to get a feel for the town and meet people. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun too.”
Because of the nature of the films, it also made more sense to shoot them for the most part in HD. “When you don’t have a script, and especially dealing with real people, you tend to shoot and shoot and shoot,” said Ogens. “It would not be practical to use film or cost effective. I like continuing to shoot and not having to stop and reload. A lot of the best stuff is when you’re not asking questions–the moments in between like when you’re spending time reloading.”
And based on his fondness for the Super 8 format, he used it when people talked about historical topics as in the Bandon, Oregon short. He also employed Super 8 to add texture to the crime scene segments in another one of the films, A New Breed of Bloodhound, explaining how Hitachi storage systems are helping the South Carolina Computer Crime Center keep the Internet safe. Additional films in the series include a documentary about a power plant that uses the company’s supercritical coal-fired technology to produce clean energy from coal, and a story about how Hitachi’s plasma screen technology migrated from college laboratories to family living rooms.
Ogens’ involvement in postproduction for all of the films was also unlike his traditional spot work.
“Usually with commercials directors aren’t really involved with postproduction, which I never really understood. To me half of directing is in production and half is in post. On a normal commercial when I am done directing and not involved in postproduction I feel like I have done only half my job. Because when you are shooting anything, whether it is scripted or unscripted, there are certain shots you do for certain reasons and certain things match up with other things you have shot and there is no way for an editor or a creative to know that without being in the room and showing them.”
Not only did Ogens collaborate extensively with editor Michael Victor of Play Editorial, he actually handpicked the editor with the agency’s approval. “I got to work with him a lot,” said Ogens. He would do his cut and then I would do my cut before we presented it to the agency. A lot of times my cut wasn’t that different from what the agency came up with and I think we ended up with a better project being able to collaborate with the editor and the agency,”
The online films will be supported by advertising and media placements including online, print and out-of-home venues.
Ang Lee To Receive ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award From American Cinema Editors
American Cinema Editors (ACE) has named two-time Oscar®-winning filmmaker Ang Lee as recipient of the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year award. He will be presented with the honor at the 76th Annual ACE Eddie Awards taking place Friday, February 27, at UCLA’s Royce Hall, where winners will also be announced in 14 competitive categories recognizing the best film editing achievements of the year in film and television. Kim Larson, managing director and head of YouTube’s Creator and Gaming team, will be accepting YouTube’s previously announced ACE Visionary Award, and Emmy winning editor/director Arthur Forney, ACE, and Oscar® nominated editor Robert Leighton will receive ACE Career Achievement awards. Lee joins a group of Golden Eddie award recipients including Jon M. Chu, John Waters, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Kathleen Kennedy, Christopher Nolan, Lauren Shuler Donner, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Spielberg, Vince Gilligan, Alexander Payne, J.J. Abrams, Nancy Meyers, Martin Scorsese, Norman Jewison, Robert Zemeckis, George Lucas, and the Sundance Institute. “Ang Lee’s exploration of our most closely held emotions has ignited an international passion for cinema for over 30 years”, said ACE president Sabrina Plisco, ACE. “The breadth of his filmography is unparalleled, ranging from the intimate and boundary-breaking romance of Brokeback Mountain, to the epic drama of Life of Pi and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to even the pre-MCU Marvel film Hulk.” This year’s ACE Visionary Award recognizes Larson and YouTube’s profound impact on visual storytelling as a whole, the importance of digital content and spaces in the evolving media landscape, and ACE’s ongoing work to support... Read More