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Ok - so I just looked at the blog and realized my last post was on July 15th and that is just totally ridiculous. Granted - we have been insanely busy you know with work and life and stuff - but still I take all of the lame points on this one. The good news is that I am going to crank some serious posts for you all now so you have some sense of what we have been up to.

To say it has been a lot is actually an understatement. We have been running at breakneck speeds and the good news is that InHouse is staying busy, healthy and our clients still are the best in the world!

I promise to write more soon. Very soon. I have tons to tell you all about, but we have been so busy lately that I have been using the times I normally write here (plane rides) to finish up additional work.

Thank you for your patience and more to come soon!

Ted

Along with the Mighty Leaf Tea video I just posted, we recently wrapped the MIX project for Delicious Living Magazine. They will use this video to help their customers understand the power of the mix platform to help promote their products.

We shot this on the JVC HD110U at the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco. It was an overcast day - probably the only one of the whole summer - so we weren’t able to get the color richness we would have preferred, but I think it does capture the spirit of the event and the purpose of MIX. We will eventually update the video to include customers and different cities to truly show the depth of their promotion efforts.

Awhile back we told you we were going to post the Mighty Leaf Tea project once it was completed. Well here it is for you all to check out. If you didn’t get a chance to read the first post, you can find it here. This was a fun project because it was the first time we used our new Redrcok Micro lens adaptor which allowed for very shallow depth of field. Also, Ryan used the NBS playoffs 2D/3D graphics trick in this one - see if you can see it as it is very subtle.

Mighty Leaf used this at the NRA show in Chicago and the video was displayed on a flat screen in the center of their booth. The booth was built around the screen and the video was tied in with their collateral marketing materials and the photography/branding elements in their booth.

We enjoyed this project and hope you take a second to check it out.

Summer is always a time for reflection in our company. The bulk of our work usually happens in the spring and fall leaving summer a time for regrouping and planning how to be more efficient and balanced in the coming craziness. While this summer has been incredibly busy for us, we have all made an effort to continue thinking about where we are headed and how we will get there. Part of this has been clarifying the core beliefs of our company and how we share that with the outside world. One of the areas I have been spending some serious brain time on lately is how we have an obligation as a company to continue doing our part to make the world in which we do business a better place.

Recently I was editing some audio voiceover for one of our oldest clients, Clover-Stornetta Farms and I heard a line in the narration that made me stop and think - “it is important to support the communities that support you”. What a simple and elegant way to sum it up - I thought. The challenge for us is that we do business all across the country, so in a sense, our community is our country. Obviously we live and work in the Bay Area, but our opportunity of contributing as a company is as large as we want to make it.

One of the most important parts of our mission statement is what we call “Empowered Profits”. If we are successful in what we do, we should be profitable as a company - this is the goal of business after all. One of the things we feel strongly about, however, is that we are not just defined by how profitable we are, but what we do with those profits. You may remember my thoughts about this after we worked with the Organic Center - if not you can read it here. The steps we take as a company to support our beliefs has the potential to truly help others committed to doing good things in the world.

While it is a fundamental core of our company to support our beliefs, I also feel a personal satisfaction in giving to causes I believe in. At the moment, this is probably one of the last things most people can imagine doing. As gas gets closer to $5 a gallon and the price of everything is going up, it is hard not to just hunker down and hold on tight. But this isn’t very satisfying and pretty soon you start to feel like you are just hoarding dollars so you can fill your tank - something I wish we didn’t have to do. While I do think it is necessary to be financially prudent right now, I also have found a great satisfaction in being more charitable at the moment. Whether it is giving away clothes to the Goodwill, or buying the FEED bag when shopping at Whole Foods, it has helped me remember that it is possible to do little things here and there that can have a big impact in other peoples lives.

All of this got me thinking, we all have the opportunity to do things within our world, and our communities to help make it a better place. For those of you who know me, you know how much my animals mean to me and that the Humane Society is one of my favorite charities. In fact, they are my first choice for where my share of our companies contribution budget goes each year. They are also doing some critical work in my home state to help better the lives of millions of farm animals - something I care deeply about.

California is one of the largest and most productive agricultural regions in the world. It is also home to some of the worst farm animal abuse in our country - especially in the large conventional dairies of the Central Valley. The Humane Society is working in conjunction with the Californians for Humane Farms - the sponsor of the Proposition 2 also known as the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act. You can read more about it here. I would encourage you to spend some time reading through the facts and learning about ways that the most basic humane standards can be achieved for our farm animals. While I am certainly not trying to ask anyone for money, I wanted to share this with you all while it was fresh on my brain.

I know this may seem a bit random for our company blog, but indulge me for a second if you will. We work with many companies within the natural foods industry who are committed to not doing these types of things. Part of our job is helping them tell their story to consumers who want to do the right thing with their dollar. While I can choose to support them with a financial contribution, I also know that helping spread the awareness of the issues will bring far more benefit to their efforts than money. Part of having a progressive company is sticking to your values even if it falls outside of the normal corporate mold. If our company - or more specifically my writing on our company blog - can help make life better for these animals, I am all for it.

As you can see - it is definitely summer at InHouse Creative. Come September I will be back in the airplane grinding through how many terabytes of server space we will need to allocate for the fall workload. I am thankful for the chance to reflect however and I appreciate you reading this post. I hope that you find some satisfaction in your own support of your beliefs.

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The last weekend of June a friend of mine from back home, Heather Kincaid, visited me here in Oakland. She came up to check out my new apartment (where both Chris and I live now), hang out and shoot as much as we could. She had done the tourist thing a few years ago in San Francisco, but never really got to experience SF on a normal day. Well she wouldn’t get that normal day this weekend. We didn’t know it, but the annual Gay Pride Parade was happening the same day we went out. Apparently this was the largest ever, so we had access to some great characters all throughout the city. We also walked around away from the parade and even caught the end of the Euro Cup soccer championship game at a cool Irish pub. Unfortunately my team (the Germans) lost to the Spanish, but we still had a great time. Enjoy.  

A while ago Chris had mentioned to our team that he had met someone with a really interesting company at an event hosted by the Exchange Bank in Santa Rosa. To be honest I was kind of skeptical about how cool this company could really be seeing that it was at a banking dinner, but I entertained the thought. When he told me that it was a green development company I definitely became interested.

Green building and the green lifestyle has become one of my major passions over the last year or so as anyone who knows me can attest to. The person Chris met at the dinner ended up being Brad Baker the president and CEO of Sonoma Mountain Village (SMV).

What they are planning to do at SMV is basically everything that I have been dreaming of for the last year or so. They have some really cool illustrations of the types of buildings they plan to build on their website along with parks and even a European styled village square.

Because Chris and Ted were the only ones to have met Brad previously, the rest of the InHouse team all traveled to their offices in Cotati, Ca. Everyone was excited about all of the possibilities for media development, and we were just as excited to hear about all the details of their forthcoming green construction. It was probably a little bit like opening Pandora’s box for me because such a cool project will definitely have me grinding on some serious ideas in my head. Check our their website when you have a second - it is definitely worth your time. It is a one of a kind concept in the U.S and a project our whole team is really excited about.

This week brought some more travel for me to one of my favorite cities - Seattle - for two meetings. The first was with the incredibly cool folks over at Nordstrom’s. I have to tell you, I am so impressed with this company. Even though I am about as far from a fashion person as possible, I have so much respect for their culture, customer service and forward thinking mentality. We had a great brainstorming meeting and I really enjoyed the chance to see their headquarters in downtown Seattle. I even picked up a new pair of kicks after the session.

Here is a picture of the Nordstrom headquarters on 6th Ave in Seattle

The second meeting was with the Pacific Northwest region of Whole Foods in Bellevue to plan their 2008 Vision Day. We were able to make some great strides in laying out the theme and logistics for the day which is coming up in early July. It’s funny - no matter where we are in the country Whole Foods is always the same. Wonderful. Seriously I am constantly amazed at how much I love working with them. It is such a great environment to be creative in and I love the chance to be part of facilitating the vision for the next year. It is so rewarding to see the many hours of hard work inspire people within the company to continue helping to change the way the world eats.

Even though I didn’t have time to visit my favorite croissant shop in Pike Place market or even sit in some brooding coffee shop while it rained, I enjoyed my time in the Emerald City. We will be returning in a couple of weeks to film and I am excited because we will also go to Portland as well as Vancouver, which is somewhere I have always wanted to see. Should be a great trip..

The funniest thing on the trip was that when I got to the airport, I was given a complimentary upgrade on my rental car. I should have known better. They put me in a limited edition Dodge Durango. This beast got a whopping 6 miles to the gallon, must have been over 7 feet tall and made me feel like a total jackass driving through a city as green as Seattle. I guess they are having a hard time renting these things out while gas is $4 a gallon

Even though we are headed back out in a couple of weeks, I was so glad to head home. As I was flying in, the sunset over the bay area was absolutely stunning. While the iPhone camera is about as bad as it gets, you can at least get an idea of what I am talking about with this photo. The pilot brought us right over the bay and it was spectacular.

You might remember a little while back I posted about our project with Mighty Leaf Tea for their booth at the NRA restaurant show in Chicago. Well, I am happy to report they had a good show and received positive comments about the piece we created for them. I think the final piece came out really well and I was particularly pleased with the depth of field as well as Ryan’s excellent idea to use the photoshop still photo idea from the NBA playoffs to give the still pictures a little more life. We were so pleased to hear the had positive feedback on the piece and look forward to future projects telling the story of their amazing teas. We will post the video on the blog very soon for you to see.