Good People
This fun little ad was created as part of a recruiting initiative, targeted towards a broad range of demographics, but primarily college students. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to make.
The idea - to make the ad a single running take - stemmed from a desire to showcase our staff, and their diverse backgrounds and career goals. Initial ideas were a bit flat, and I suggested making things a bit more visually stimulating and engaging, cheekily suggesting we take some influence from Martin Scorsese. To my surprise, my idea was green lit, and we moved forward. I walked through the area and drew up storyboards, floor plans, and choreographed our lead’s movement.
After pre-production was finished, we naturally moved into production. I found an actress that I felt could appeal to a wide variety of people as our lead, and used actual Manhattan employees to fill in the background. We also hired a stellar steadicam operator (Daniel Eckler) to operate our camera, and he and I worked closely together to get the lighting and choreography just right. We ended up with about twenty takes, all of them fantastic, and chose from there. Once we had our take, I got to implementing the motion graphics, color, and sound, which altogether took about three-hundred hours.
Comedy!
Laughter is my personal favorite persuasive device - if you can make someone laugh, they’re much more willing to hear you out. When tasked with encouraging Manhattan employees to return to the office, my team and I opted for a more humorous approach than the expected dry corporate spiel.
Talking Heads
Talking heads are a big part of my job at Manhattan, I typically record at least one per week, often more. As a result, I’ve fine-tuned my skills in this area to make an already simple process even more simple and streamlined. I can generally set up an interview like these within an hour, which means lights, camera, sound, and even a teleprompter if needed.
Motion Graphics
Manhattan works with a lot of really cool companies, and we needed a simple and effective way to show that off - but it still had to be engaging. So, we landed on this cyclical animation of around a hundred well-known brands who use Manhattan’s technology.