Projects
New Media Storytelling in Development
Near the Rialto: Cafe Artisti is a small 14-seat restaurant in Venice, Italy, about a 10-minute stroll from the famous Rialto Market. This tiny restaurant is run by father/daughter duo, Franco and Francesca Cianco. They come from a family of chefs. Their cooking is tethered to a simple standard: use few ingredients but use the best ones possible. They begin each morning with a visit to the Rialto market, talking with their suppliers to find out what is fresh and in season.
Near the Rialto follows food from fields and seas to the tables of Cafe Artisti. We meet the vintners, olive oil producers, farmers and fishermen, follow the foods as they're harvested, and journey back to the restaurant to experience the creations of master Italian chefs.
Possible Branding Opportunities: Airlines, Travel Websites, Global food brands with smaller niche product marketing.
Travels with Barley: Based on a book by Wall Street journalist and Louisiana Cajun, Ken Wells, Travels with Barley is a brisk, celebratory narrative through the precints of the beerk makers, sellers, drinkers and thinkers who collectively drive the mighty River of Beer onward. The heart of the book and the web series is a journey along the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to Louisiana, in a quixotic search for the mythical Perfect Beer Joint - a journey that turns out to be the perfect pretext for viewing America through the prism of a beer glass. Ken brings a keen eye and prodigious reportage to the people and passions that have propelled beer into America’s favorite alcoholic beverage and the beer industry into $75 billion a year juggernaut and potent force in American culture.
Possible Branding Opportunities: Perfect for the international beer company seeking to individualize itself and provide its consumers with witty and engaging content about the history and ongoing cultural influence of beer.
Becoming an Outdoorswoman: How do you learn to hunt, fish or camp? Someone has to teach you. The "Becoming an Outdoorswoman" (BOW) project started when 2 hunters realized that their wives never went hunting or camping - and it was because they'd never learned how. And so the "Becoming an Outdoorswoman" project was born.
Over the course of one weekend in July, the BOW camp in Fairbanks, AK teaches about 100 women to learn shooting, archery, canoeing and other nature and survival skills in a positive atmosphere. Women often wind up here when they feel they can't learn these skills from husbands, fathers or brothers without criticism and confrontation. This series would follow a few strong female participants and male or female instructors through the weekend and back to their normal lives to see how they utilize their newfound skills.
Possible Branding Opportunities: Outdoors and Sporting Goods Companies looking to capture a greater share of the female market.
Previous New Media Branding Work
Elevation Zero is a social media storytelling project that was developed in association with The Martin Agency and Moxie Pictures. It has a two-pronged approach: tracking on-the-ground aftermath of human-made disasters like the Gulf Coast oil spill while also following the 24-hour news media's short attention span to global catastrophes. The multi-platform project approach is to provide ongoing, long-term storytelling after the incident is no longer front page news.
Y'all Versus Us was a partnership between Moxie Pictures and Young & Rubicam for their client Cellular South, the largest cell provider in the Deep South. Spanning the course of one autumn football season, the Y'all Versus Us project was a sprawling advertising campaign throughout the Deep South that involved broadcasting high school football games, grassroots marketing and billboards, and a new media campaign centered around the creation of an episodic online series following the season between two big rival high school football teams. Called "Head 2 Head: The coaches show," this series was broadcast weekly in the Deep South on Cell South's website. When the series was complete, it was repackaged and sold to Fox Sports where it aired nationally in 2010.
Burning Ice, produced for the BBC, is a feature film documenting the journey of a group of artists on an Arctic expedition to experience firsthand the tipping points of climate change. Buring Ice played on the international festival circuit and aired on the Sundance Channel in the U.S. and the BBC in Europe. Most recently, it was acquired by Patagonia. The film will be broken into small online segments like the one above and distributed as branded entertainment as part of a Patagonia global awareness campaign.
Filmmaker Bios
Peter Gilbert (Co-Producer/Co-Director) is one of the filmmakers who made Hoop Dreams, serving as a Producer and Director of Photography. The film won numerous awards including The Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, Producers Guild of America, and the Independent Spirit Award. Hoop Dreams was on 100+ top ten lists for 1994. The film was selected into the National Film Archives. It was also selected the most important Documentary Film by the IDA in its history.
Gilbert has had a distinguished career in producing, directing, and photographing documentaries, feature films and commercials. In 2008 he co-produced and co- directed the award winning film At The Death House Door, which was short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Gilbert's commercial work includes Harley Davidson, Budweiser, Ford, Major League Baseball, MasterCard, Honda, ESPN, and the NBA. He is a Board Member of Kartemquin Films, in Chicago.
Lisa Gildehaus (Co-Producer/Co-Director) was the series producer of Y’all Vs Us: Head 2 Head, an episodic documentary series shot over four months in rural Mississippi that aired in the U.S. on Fox Sports. Her long-format documentary work includes Town and Country (Producer/Director - Milwaukee International Film Festival premiere 2009, Trail Dance Film Festival 2011), Almost Home (Co-Producer, Co-Director), which was part of the 2006 ITVS Independent Lens series; and Oracle of Omaha (Producer/Director - Wisconsin International Film Festival), about billionaire Warren Buffett.
Her non-profit documentary clients include: the University of Minnesota, Marquette University, United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Girls for a Change; as well as commercial clients such as Wilson Sports, Nike, and McDonalds. In 2010, her work won a CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education), a One Show Entertainment Award, a Cannes Lion in the “Best Use of Sponsorship,” and accolades in the Wall Street Journal. She was a selected participant in the 2008 HotDocs DocLab and the 2011 Berlinale Talent Campus.
