Justin and Gary’s Internet Adventure
By Tim.As Allen Stern noted on his blog, earlier this week The Media Kitchen held the Digital Media Venture Conference, introducing their clients to innovative VC-funded startups that are changing the media plans of tomorrow. The Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman approached us about helping them create an icebreaker video to kick off the spirit of the day, and we jumped at the chance to work with them on it, as Darren and The Media Kitchen have been big supporters and cheerleaders of our work.
After a bit of brainstorming with Darren and MK’s president, Barry Lowenthal, we came up with the video embedded above (here’s an HD version), featuring Gary, Indy Mogul’s incomparable puppet co-host (mostly because he’d be available for all the shoots) in a whirlwind tour of some of the better-known companies in Silicon Alley. All glory due to the amazing Justin Johnson, NNN’s superstar associate producer and first hire, who wrote, directed and produced the piece in a couple days’ time with no budget and a supplemental crew of one, which to me is just incredible.
Special thanks to Barry, Darren and Nicole DelVecchio from The Media Kitchen, David and Marco from Tumblr, Richard Blakeley from Gawker Media, Jake and Amir from CollegeHumor, Erik Beck, Derek D, Rob Czar and Corinne Leigh from Next New Networks, and Lindsay Campbell and Julie Alexandria from CBS Interactive for being such good sports, and to all the other people from NNN and Frederator who helped out as Rock Band partygoers or Gary stand-ins (especially Ben Ross). And special props to Kyle Fassenella, who DP’d and contributed all the amazing steadicam work; Rachel Garcia, for coming up with the idea to have Gary be the star; and Liam Collins, our super-nice VP of Finance and Business Affairs, for playing against type as the jerk who tells Erik to get back to work.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
the video was so fun - and when you hit darren’s music and he came around the corner, i almost bust a rib.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Allen, there’s an extended version of Darren’s theme, which is even better — a total Mean Streets homage. I’ll try to get Justin to post it soon.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
yea!
June 27th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Another fun fact: just found out that Blakeley really did put a photo of Gary on his Tumblr:
http://blakeley.tumblr.com/post/38816306/shooting-with-gary-the-puppet
June 30th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Great Vid!
July 6th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
that was awesome.