Digital Kitchen: Creativity in the Blood
How do you market to a vampire? That’s the challenge interactive agency Digital Kitchen faced as they created a series of fang-in-cheek ads to promote HBO’s smash show True Blood. Using applications such as Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite, the all-Mac shop produced billboards and print ads for brands like MINI and Gillette, and a collection of darkly humorous online viral videos revealing that, after all, vampires are people too.
"The True Blood campaign is done on software and hardware that you can get at the Apple Store," says Mark Bashore, Digital Kitchen’s creative head. "The tools are easily accessible, which allows us to focus on being creative. That's why we use the Mac."
Courtesy HBO
It’s not the first time Digital Kitchen has crossed paths with the undead: They also created the swampy, atmospheric opening title sequence for True Blood, now in its second season. The agency already had a reputation for crafting creepy, cutting-edge intros, including the memorable opening credits for HBO hits such as Six Feet Under and Showtime's Dexter, and for Fox’s phenomenally successful House. Digital Kitchen has also produced ads for Budweiser, HBO, Coke, Showtime, Sundance, AT&T, and Microsoft, among others. With offices in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Manhattan, it's one of the leading digital agencies in the U.S.
True Hybrids
For the True Blood title sequence, Digital Kitchen combined film clips in a myriad of styles to create a morose melange that reflects the show's darkly comic premise: that vampires are among us, their lethal bloodlust now sated by a synthetic blood drink. The titles blend film and digital footage, along with handmade paper-cut titles that were scanned and dropped into the scene with Adobe After Effects.
The team used Avid Media Composer on the Mac to assemble the diverse footage. The sequence is typical Digital Kitchen: a hodgepodge of formats from scanned film to DV to HD mixed with graphics and handmade artwork. "We shot everything from 16 mm film to HD video, which is typical for us," Bashore notes.
The agency increasingly turns to Final Cut Pro to produce video sequences for television and the web. “We edit most of our HD entertainment projects in Final Cut Pro,” says Bashore. “With Final Cut, we're able to work natively with almost any video format. That gives us a tremendous amount of freedom."
"That's the inherent flexibility of Final Cut," agrees Andy Steinberg, Vice President of IT at Digital Kitchen. "We can work in any format that fits our workflow. To say our workflow is organic is an understatement. It's always changing, and no two jobs have the same steps. Final Cut works how we want to work, regardless of formats or workflows."
Fusing together miscellaneous footage is standard practice at Digital Kitchen. The shop works with every codec imaginable, from DV to uncompressed 4K. "As an editor who deals with heavy graphics and FX work, I work with numerous formats, frame rates, and aspect ratios," says Digital Kitchen editor Andrew Maggio. "No other platform has allowed me to do this as seamlessly as Final Cut Pro. It also allows intense timelines involving many layers to be mocked up and rendered, with speeds that won't interrupt the flow of a client session."
Aim for the Heart
True Blood is a true hit, the biggest thing on HBO since The Sopranos. To promote the show, HBO had already introduced a few fake commercials featuring the show's simulated blood drink. So for Digital Kitchen, it was only logical to think about marketing other everyday products to vampires. The agency pitched HBO on a multimedia campaign featuring print ads, billboards, and short videos distributed on YouTube and other websites. Before long, major brands like MINI, Harley Davidson, Gillette, ECKŌ, and Monster.com had signed on.
The Digital Kitchen crew in Chicago used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on the Mac to produce the print ads. To make them as authentic as possible, they borrowed from existing campaigns, adding taglines like "Feel the wind in your fangs [MINI]," "Dead Sexy [Gillette]," and "Outrun the Sun [Harley Davidson]."
Digital Kitchen also devised a series of homemade and found-footage style video clips to immerse viewers in the True Blood world. In addition to several videos that tell the story of vampires coming clean, the agency crafted a short fake international news spot and a CCTV-recorded legal deposition.
"First and foremost we're a digital agency," says Bashore, "but our roots are in making films. The place is filled with people who love filmmaking and storytelling. With these viral video pieces, we wanted to tell the stories of people ‘coming out’ as vampires. We shot in an un-composed, under-produced manner, and ended up with a style that accentuates the story, not the production."
