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Bits & Pieces 6 Post • June 2014 www.postmagazine.com Bits & Pieces Morgan Spurlock Inside Man N EW YORK — CNN recently tapped entertain- ment branding agency Loyalkaspar to create a multi-platform marketing campaign for the second season of the network's original series, Morgan Spurlock Inside Man. The one-hour weekly series tackles a wide range of subjects that are part of the national con- versation, including personal privacy, income disparity, America's obsession with pets, and the big business of college athletics. Led by creative director Anna Minkkinen, Loyalkaspar worked with CNN's on-air promotion team to create a campaign encompassing digital and broadcast promos, key art, and rich media content for Website takeovers. The studio also produced a customizable on-air graphics toolkit for the network's in-house broadcast design team to produce episodic promos. For the key art, Loyalkaspar visualized both Spurlock's personality and his means of getting the story. They found their solution in a portrait of him layered in artifacts and clothing that represent the various worlds he inhabits during the season. For the on-air and digital promos, vari- ous Morgans playfully interact with one another. Minkki- nen shot each character with two cameras – one full- body and one up close. Nat Geo & Bigsmack partner on Brain campaign W ASHINGTON, DC — National Geographic Channels International (NGCI) (www.natgeotv. com) announced a new programming and marketing campaign, Entertain Your Brain, with a series of new and returning shows that spotlight the workings of science and the human mind through experiments, viewer-driven brain teasers and man-on-the-street trials. The campaign, which kicked off earlier this year with the return of the Emmy-nominated, global series Brain Games and was followed by other programs, is a creative col- laboration between NGCI and Bigsmack (www.bigs- mack.tv), an entertainment marketing agency with locations in New York and Philadelphia. To drive viewers and connect with their curiosi- ty, NGCI developed a robust, marketing cam- paign featuring more than 60 unique creative execu- tions for on-air, digital and print, including 11 distinct promos, print ad templates and a customized Website that showcases what NGCI feels is the world's most enthusiastic superfan: the brain. NGCI and Bigsmack created a five-foot-tall "living" brain character whose unbridled curiosity and thirst to know more leave him craving to stimulate his neurons through Entertain Your Brain content. Filming with the brain spanned over three months and multiple locations. The brain has even started a blog and his own Facebook feed that is also localized regionally. In the upcoming months, the brain will be traveling around the world to NGCI markets. Bigsmack was involved with the character development, filming and the editorial, post, sound design, and audio for the promo campaign. It created a diverse look for an original design (the brain) in a pro- motional campaign that was executed on-air, digitally and through print. Shot on the Arri Alexa camera, Bigsmack relied on Final Cut 7 for editing, After Effects for VFX, Nuke for scene cleanup, Resolve for color grading and Pro Tools for audio. Since its launch, the campaign has aired in 170 countries around the world, and will be translated into 45 languages throughout 2014. Creative Storage Conference keynote looks at Cloud C ULVER CITY, CA — The 2014 Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org) will be held Tuesday, June 24th at the DoubleTree Hotel West Los Angeles in Culver City, CA. The event brings together digital storage providers, equipment and software manufacturers, and professional media and entertainment end users to explore the confer- ence theme of "Collaborative Workflows and Stor- age Objects." The 2014 CS Conference will provide insight into a broad range of storage technologies used in professional media and entertainment applications. Quantum, Corning, HDS, Oracle, Sony and Zadara will be among the exhibitors at the show, which is put on by the Entertainment Storage Alliance (www.enter tainmentstorage.org) and Coughlin Associates (www.tomcoughlin.com). Alex Grossman, VP of media and entertainment at Quantum, will give the keynote, focusing on cloud storage in modern media and entertainment work- flows. Grossman's keynote will address "The Smarter Cloud for Media: More than Compute and Storage — True Post and Broadcast Production Workflow." Content creators are under extreme pressure to remain competitive and embrace higher resolutions, such as 4K, as well as new camera formats and a growing range of delivery options. Combine this with distributed teams and remote approval, and these factors are pushing the limits of traditional content delivery and post workflow strategies, as well as the underlying infrastructure that powers these systems. The keynote will look at how the cloud can not only relieve this pressure but also be an important way to evolve and accelerate creative workflows. The conference features six sessions. Post readers can get $100 off registration with promo code "onehundredoff516381" or at https:// cs2014.eventbrite.com/?discount=onehundredo ff516381.