Chunky Monkey. Cherry Garcia. Phish Food. Cookie Dough.

The names of Ben & Jerry’s iconic flavors deliver more than a mouthful of the Vermont ice cream retailer’s consistently signature brand. But inside its 700 scoop shops, Ben & Jerry’s was having a hard time telling the rest of its story.

“Some brands just aren’t very authentic, but Ben & Jerry’s, which has a very authentic brand, had kind of squandered it over the years trying different things that veered away from what it does best,” says Art Bell, an independent filmmaker based in Burlington, Vermont, who recently produced a graphics-rich display piece that will loop in Ben & Jerry’s stores worldwide. “Their message just kind of got messy.”
Enter the brand strategy firm, Tesser (Haagen-Dazs, KFC, Gap and many others), which set out to realign the 31-year-old company’s chakras, as it were, and distill its message. “The Tesser folks built a mock-up store inside Ben & Jerry’s corporate head office featuring the interior of a Volkswagen bus like the one the real Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield used to travel around in during the 1970s,” says Bell. “They put two HD displays-40-inch Brillion monitors-in each of the front windows. What they wanted for content on those displays was a really soft messaging and branding,” he says. “No hard sell, but just a visually and motivating display to push the company’s economic mission and social mission, and of course, their product line.”

For a filmmaker who has cut his teeth on television graphics, music videos, short films, and political campaign commercials, it’s ironic that there was actually no video in his winning presentation. “I was the only one of the three pitches that had no video,” he says. “But it’s still filmmaking-it all moves, and I put in there everything I know about Final Cut and Motion, and my animator put in all he knows about After Effects.”

Bell says he also made up for the lack of video by using an awful lot of video plug-ins, specifically Noise Industries’ FxFactory Pro, which he purchased last year at NAB. His updated Effects list inside FxFactory is an A-to-Z tally of his favorite Noise flavors. “CoverFlux is a very sexy application, and I love the Spotlight tool, which I think is the best one I’ve ever used,” he says. “It has beautiful controls over it. And I absolutely love the Depth of Field Filter found in the Advanced Blur plug-in.”

It wasn’t until two other facilities had failed to nail their initial pitches for the display content, Bell points out, that he was asked to give it a shot, and he credits the range and speed of the FxFactory plug-in palette with landing him this particular project. “I was told later that two Ben & Jerry executives in the room at the time said something like, ‘We’ve just spent a lot of money trying to refocus this brand. These displays are the centerpiece of our new mission. We need something fresher.’ Lucky for me, someone in the room knew about me for some political video work I’d done, and called me up. They told me I had a week to do a pitch and that there was no money in it. I have a freelance animator and he and I sat here for eight days and on a shared server and just cranked out a whole bunch of stuff.”

Bell’s was also the most technically smart presentation. Though he is now an independent filmmaker, he was also a founder and former head of R+D at Alias Research, the creators of Maya, and a founder and former CTO of Oprah’s Oxygen Network; he is still intrigued by a good old technological obstacle. “When I won my pitch, they told me that my stuff just doesn’t look corporate. I have a marketing background, but more importantly, I understood the math of making two screens work seamlessly together. The other companies who pitched made two separate presentations on the two screens. I leased an algorithm from a company that allowed me to write two HD displays as one. A DV timeline is 720 x 480; an HD timeline is 1920 x1080. My timeline for this project was 2738 x 768, and I found that ProRes was the only codec I tried (and I tried 20 different ones) that let me break the ratio. All the other codecs are hard-coded to 4:3 or 16:9 or something else, and I think it’s because of the scaler effect that ProRes didn’t care. I could set it at any vertical or any horizontal resolution. As soon as I did that, I was away to the races.” The final piece used the new ProRes QuickTime for Windows codec to sync the PC-based signage. He finished the piece on his studio’s two 8-core Mac Pros with 13 GBs of RAM, which run two RAID-5 disc arrays and give him about 12 TB online.

No Audio
Bell’s clients initially asked him not to use audio in his pitch presentation. “At first, I couldn’t take not having any audio to work with, so I went into one of the stores and recorded some natural sound and just let it roll,” he says. “I threw that into my timeline-I had people talking, babies crying, some kid hitting a scoop against the side of a tray. I left that in when I gave my pitch. I’ve always thought that made a difference, though I don’t really know for sure.” When the displays roll out, background music will come randomly from Ben + Jerry’s All-Natural Radio, a Sirius Satellite station. “It’s not intended to be in sync,” says Bell. “But it gives at least some control over the music being played inside the stores, so some strange mix tape by an employee never finds its way out of the store speakers.”

Because he used so many FxFactory plug-ins, Bell decided, at the last minute, to enter an excerpt of the Ben & Jerry’s piece into a recent Noise Industries user contest. He won First Runner-Up. He’s also currently working on a feature film, a comedy about high school students who want to do all the normal teenager things and, in their spare time, save the planet. He’s experimenting with Red Giant ToonIt! on several of its montages.

Life Is Good
Bell says he’s been relatively lucky and hasn’t yet experienced a downturn in work due to the worsening economy. He once commuted every four days for three years from Vermont to New York when he was with Oxygen Network earlier in the decade. After a short-lived wireless venture, Bell moved on to filmmaking. “I was always fascinated with the motion graphics side of things. I made one little short film, then another, and before I knew it, I was doing this full time,” he says. “I brought some other people in and started doing work for a television show for a PBS station.”

It’s the quality of his life, he adds, that makes a difference in his work. “I love my life here. I can play hockey 150 times a year and bike to work. I spent years, previously, being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of very few. My life has gotten much smaller and much deeper and much more satisfying now.”

When the hockey season gives way to spring skiing and the thaw finally comes to Burlington, Bell will probably go out in search of another one of his abiding passions, a cone of one of Ben & Jerry’s most elusive flavors, “Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz.”

To watch Bell’s award-winning spot, go here. For more about Dreamlike Pictures, visit www.dreamlikepictures.com.