1. Oak Street Bootmakers

    As its owner George Vlagos says at the beginning of the video, Oak Street Bootmakers makes high-end men’s boots and shoes the old-fashion way: on a bench, by hand, in Maine. 

    We braved the icy cold of Maine in December (it rarely got above 10 degrees during our visit) to film the workshop and shoemaking process to create a short film focusing on the brand’s commitment to craftsmanship, quality, and making shoes in the USA. 

    The video made its debut on the uber-influential men’s fashion blog A Continuous Lean and has been featured on Hypebeast, Selectism, Secret Forts and more than 200 other Websites, initiating record-breaking traffic and sales for Oak Street. 

  2. Miami Design District | Art Basel 2011

    For the past few years, we’ve provided production services for the Miami Design District during the week of Art Basel. This year, rather than the standard wrap-up videos we’d done before, we decided to do something a little different. Common Machine created a dedicated microsite and a series of short documentary films, profiling artists, designers, curators, and gallery owners showing in the Miami Design District during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. 

    The ten short films feature such acclaimed art world figures as sound-and-light artist Christopher Janney, graffiti muralist Retna, and urban interventionist Rubén Ochoa. The microsite — built on the Cargo Collective platform in a mood board-style layout — itself functions as a curated digital art installation, giving viewers a dramatic sense of what went on in the Design District during the most important week on the North American art calendar. 

    Both the URL links and the embed codes for the videos were made available to the press every day as new videos went up for sharing on blogs and websites. 

    Check out the microsite and all the videos here.

  3. Skip the Stampede, Viral video for AirTran Airways

    In the spring of 2010, we got a call from AirTran Airways’ Director of PR Christopher White asking if we’d seen the ad Southwest Airlines was airing during the NCAAs, showing a bunch of their crazy ramp workers running up and flashing an AirTran plane. We had indeed. Apparently, AirTran crew members were hoping the company wouldn’t take Southwest’s crack lying down and there was much discussion from the ramp to the halls of HQ.

    AirTran decided that while it wasn’t interested in buying expensive national airtime, it was interested in having some good-natured fun with its competitor and satisfying the crew members call for retaliation. White and Common Machine executive producer Brett O’Bourke discussed some ideas and agreed the target was pretty obvious: Southwest’s much-maligned cattle call boarding procedure.

    On Thursday morning, on a flight out to Las Vegas (for a little tourney gambling), O’Bourke wrote the script and storyboards for the spot. On Friday, White secured the actors — the cows would be played by volunteer crew members and the talent came from local Atlanta improv group Dad’s Garage — while CM intern Christine Sylvain tracked down the cow costumes. 

    On Sunday, O’Bourke and his crew — cameraman and Steadicam operator Richard Patterson and editor Jorge Rubiera — flew into Atlanta. The shoot went down on Monday, editing on Tuesday with some tweaks on Wednesday, approval from AirTran brass on Thursday and the video hit the Internet Friday morning.

    Within the first three days online the video racked up more than 45,000 views, was featured on television newscasts in more than 50 markets across the U.S. and received coverage in print and online publications, including USA Today, ABC, CBS, Bloomberg, the AJC, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, and a ton of others.

    Current views are over 100K and Cramer-Krasselt, AirTran’s agency of record, estimated advertising value of approximately $500K. Not too shabby for a video shot on the cheap and assembled in about 24 working hours.

  4. Hecho A Mano: Creativity in Exile

    The Emmy Award-winning documentary Hecho a Mano: Creativity in Exile weaves together the stories of four Cuban artists living in Miami: pianist Paquito Hechavarría, sculptor Tony López, and ceramicists Nelson and Ronald Currás.

    Even those who may have never heard their names before should be familiar with their work: Hechavarría played piano for some of Cuba’s biggest bands, was a regular performer at the Fontainebleau in the ’60s, and created the infectious opening to Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga;” López is responsible for thousands of sculptures, including the unforgettable Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach; and the Currás Brothers are known for large-scale tile mosaics that grace private homes, hotels, and public spaces throughout the Caribbean.

    From Cuba to their early experiences in exile to today, Hecho a Mano explores their dedication to craft and their ability to create under often challenging circumstances. A documentary about life’s unexpected turns and the joy of working with your hands.

    The film premiered on Miami PBS affiliate WLRN In February 2011 and has aired in select markets nationwide, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Antonio and Denver.

    Winner: 
    *Emmy® for Historical/Cultural Program, Suncoast Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 2011 
    *Best Florida Documentary, 2010 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival
    *Best Local Film, 2010 Miami Short Film Festival
    *Best Documentary, 2010 Miami Short Film Festival 

    Producers: Brett O’Bourke and Gaspar González
    Director: Brett O’Bourke
    Writer: Gaspar González
    Director of Photography: Richard Patterson
    Editor: Christina Burchard
    Assoc. Producer: Christine Sylvain

  5. Plastic Paradise: A Swingin’ Trip Through America’s Polynesian Obsession

    Following the success of Hecho a Mano: Creativity in Exile, our Emmy-winning film about Cuban artists living in Miami, PBS affiliate WLRN has commissioned another documentary from the Common Machine team: Plastic Paradise, an hour-long look at tiki culture. Also known as Polynesian Pop, tiki was huge in the 1950s and ‘60s — think South Pacific, candy-colored, rum-infused cocktails with names like the Shrunken Skull and the Missionary’s Downfall, crazy Hawaiian shirts, exotica music, and a nonstop party scene inhabited by self-styled nonconformists.

    To the surprise of many, tiki survives in the present day as an underground hipster subculture stretching from coast-to-coast. Crafted cocktails, Hawaiian shirts, and exotica remain de rigueur among Polynesian Pop adherents, as does an annual pilgrimage to Fort Lauderdale’s famed Mai-Kai Restaurant (one of the last great holdovers from tiki’s golden age—waterfalls, Polynesian floor show, and all).

    Plastic Paradise will explore this fascinating scene, and the folks who’ve kept it going all these years. (Like our friend, King Kukulele.) 

    Look for Plastic Paradise on the festival circuit in 2012 and, from there, on PBS affiliates nationwide.

  6. Sylvester Cancer Center TV Spots

    When the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, a world-class facility affiliated with the University of Miami, wanted a new approach for its television spots, its agency, the Weinbach Group, came to Common Machine. 

    The job: Compose a series of TV commercials reminding the South Florida marketplace that Sylvester, despite its preeminence as a regional research facility, should also be the first treatment option for anyone diagnosed with the disease — and do it in a way that didn’t rely on scare tactics, visuals of imposing machines, or other elements usually associated with medical advertising. Sylvester wanted six 30-second spots, each touting the benefits of a different treatment area: lung cancer, breast cancer, stem-cell transplantation, radiation oncology, Nanoknife technology, and “Ask for Ana,” Sylvester’s in-house patient services and counseling program.

    After consulting with our client and interviewing the researchers and doctors at Sylvester, we came up with a novel strategy: Place the specialists at Sylvester in a clean studio environment, have them tell us about the things that make Sylvester unique, but do it the way they might tell a neighbor — using a more conversational style, substituting analogies for medical jargon — then couple that with striking b-roll footage driving their main point home. 

    The six commercials will air continuously in South Florida throughout the first six months of 2012.

  7. Miller Miami 2010 for Splendid Comms

    Smokin’ hot, London-based communications agency Splendid brought Common Machine onboard during WMC 2010 to help execute an activation for its client Miller Genuine Global, which leveraged contests, press, and word-of-mouth to discover the best emerging electronic music artists from around the world.

    Positioned as a premium beer overseas, Miller brought to Miami a select group of 100 DJs, tastemakers, brand managers, and media from all over the world: Turkey, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Paraguay, Chile, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Panama, South Africa, and Russia. 

    Common Machine assisted Splendid in strategizing and executing multilayered social media video coverage of the Miller sponsored events. DJs were set up with blogs, outfitted with small, state-of-the-art DV cameras, and encouraged to shoot, shoot, shoot. 

    An HD editing suite, helmed by a Common Machine editor, was established at the host hotel to facilitate the creation of on-the-spot uploadable media for the duration of the events. Common Machine shot blanket coverage of all events and created a wrap video for display on the final morning of the event. 

    Shortly after they returned to their home countries, Common Machine sent the DJs a 16 GB flash drive with pre-packaged b-roll, footage of their performances, Miller Miami 2010 logos, and a copy of the wrap video for creation and dissemination of additional viral media.

  8. Enrique Martínez Celaya: Schneebett

    In the summer of 2011, large crates began showing up at the Whale and Star complex we share with acclaimed artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. 

    The crates contained Schneebett, an installation Martínez Celaya had exhibited at the Berliner Philharmonie in 2004. Inspired by Beethoven’s final days, the work consists of a bronze, life-size sculpture, a painting, a chair, and tree branches. The sculpture is of a bed, and is connected to a cooling unit that produces a blanket of ice on its surface. (“Schneebett” is German for “snow bed.”) 

    The work had been donated to the Miami Art Museum by German collector Dieter Rosenkranz and would be the museum’s featured exhibit during one of the biggest weeks on the international art calendar: Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. 

    Before it could be shown, however, Schneebett had to be retrofitted with a new cooling system that could stand up to Miami’s hotter temps, not to mention the heat generated by the large crowds that would gather to view this important addition to MAM’s permanent collection. 

    Realizing that we had a very small window of time — the retooling would be done over the course of a few short months — we grabbed our cameras and got to work on a documentary chronicling not only the mechanical upgrades, but the ideas that had inspired this significant commission in the career of Martínez Celaya.

    The resulting short film, simply titled Enrique Martínez Celaya: Schneebett, premiered at an invitation-only event at Miami’s “Art Hotel,” The Sagamore, during Art Basel. 

    Couldn’t make it that night? You can watch it here.

  9. AirTran Airways

    In the fall of 2009, AirTran Airways was looking to launch an aggressive new multimedia online initiative — dubbed Inside AirTran — to communicate with its 8,500 employees, who are spread out across the country. 

    AirTran already had a daily e-mail blast, but knew that video was a much more effective means of getting message penetration. They were on the hunt for a production company that could not only make complex ideas simple and digestible, but package them in visually compelling, Web-ready, documentary-style videos. 

    Common Machine quickly outpaced the other production companies AirTran was trying out and we’ve been the airline’s exclusive production company ever since. 

    We’ve so far produced more than 30 videos for Inside AirTran. We’ve shot station visits in Boston, executive dunk-tank fund-raisers in Orlando, crew base openings in Milwaukee, and quick turns in Tampa. We’ve braved the paint bays in Miami to film the special livery paint jobs of the Indianpolis Colts, Orlando Magic, Atlanta Falcons, and Baltimore Ravens planes; we’ve sweated buckets on the tarmac in Orlando to document the Ramp Relay Championships, gotten wet for flight attendant life-raft training and given away bikes to underprivileged kids in Orlando. We even scored a minor YouTube hit (100K views and counting) with a viral video we made for AirTran when then rival (and now new owner) Southwest Airlines took a shot at them in a national commercial spot. (See the “Skip the Stampede” entry for the whole story.) 

    Since launching the employee-targeted site, AirTran has accumulated more than 250,000 page views and the site has become the go-to resource for crew members around the country. Nearly half of the airlines employees have signed up for the site’s RSS feed as have several journalists that cover the company, competitors and the above mentioned new owner, Southwest.

    It’s been a blast and — with our seats and tray tables in their upright and locked positions — we’re still enjoying the ride.

  10. Sylvester Cancer Center Survivor Stories

    Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center asked if we could take portraits of cancer survivors to accompany some text-only stories they were posting to their Website.

    When we heard their inspiring stories, and met these amazing people, we suggested to the folks at Sylvester that they may want to capture audio as well. And if we were going to hit a record button, why not go all the way and hit record on a video camera? Needless to say, the project quickly grew into a compilation video and four individual doc-style interviews that anchored an entire redesign and relaunch of the cancer center’s Website. 

    The videos — a cross-section of patients and experiences — have been so successful, we’re recently shot the third round of survivor stories.

Next »