Mumbai-based Equinox Films Director Ram Madhvani–who is represented in the US and UK by Great Guns–just completed a TVC for Indian wood manufacturer Greenply titled "Always Hoyenga". The spot poses a question about how to deal with the future by depicting a wildly raucous New Year's Party and the tagline "Always Hoyenga," using the Hindi term that roughly translates to mean "it will come to be."  The director partnered with Lowe Lintas in Mumbai on the spot, which features a band at the party playing a tune composed for the shoot by the Indian feature film music director Sameeruddin. The spot has registered with the media in India, being cited in newspaper stories as an example of how things will be what they will in today's complex society. The production employed 60 actors and included choreography by Abhimanyu Ray and Avit Dias.  DOP on the spot was Sejal Shah. EP for Equinox was Manoj Shroff, and the spot was produced by Line Producer Sunitha Ram. Editing was Prakash Kurup at Prime Focus in Mumbai.

Rattling Stick Director Sara Dunlop has kicked off the year with a new Blackberry Curve campaign hitting the air in the US, Italy, Middle East, Latin America and the Netherlands. The spot shows a nighttime bike ride through the wet streets of Berlin. In other news about the director, her work for The Havens, a London-based crisis center that helps rape and assault victims, continued to be recognized at advertising industry awards events in 2011. The piece titled "Where's Your Line?" was awarded a Cannes Lions Bronze for Best Interactive Film. Dunlop wrote and directed the film, which recently garnered four key honors at the 2011 British Arrows Craft Awards in London.

The Cortez Brothers' Director Fernando Arrioja recently shot a CG-driven Coors Light spot titled "Cold Practice" via Texas-based Bromley.  Created for the Spanish-speaking market, the spot opens on a young man enjoying a soccer game at a local bar. "This project was filled with obstacles and challenges, but luckily for us, we had Fernando Arrioja," says Henry Botello, Bromley Senior Broadcast Producer. "He had solutions, improvements, and ideas that took our vision of this commercial to the next level." Since scheduling issues prevented Arrioja from shooting the soccer players and coach on location in the Rocky Mountains, he worked closely with the agency creatives to determine what elements were needed to recreate an extreme soccer camp in the snow. Background plates of the Rockies, snow, and mountain views were shot in Vail, Colorado. These were later incorporated into the final footage with the soccer players, who were shot in a studio in Mexico City with salt standing in for the snow.

MPC Creative Director Dan Marsh and creative agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, L.A. recently launched a new spot for the Nissan all-electric Leaf titled "Singing Sockets". The spot features electricity celebrating the vehicle's first birthday, with electrical sockets of all types in various locations singing "Happy Birthday" to the year-old vehicle. The agency creative team included Rob Schwartz, Tito Melega, Karl Dunn, Liz Levy, Elaine Hinton and Katie Johnson. The MPC team worked on all the VFX and post for the spot, while the Director of Photography was Mark Williams.

Molson M has just launched a new 30-second TVC in Canada created by BBDO Toronto and directed by Dom Bridges for Industry Films. The spot, titled "Masters", draws a parallel between the artistry found in various mediums with the artistry found in Molson M. "There's an art to everything," says the voiceover, as we see painters painting, dancers dancing, musicians playing, even a glassblower blowing.  "Ours is captured in a glass." The spot closes with an on-screen title card that says "Every medium has its master."  Versions have been released in both English and French. The spot features an array of artists across many mediums: from the culinary arts with Mark McEwan to street art with Elicser Elliott, a Toronto-based mural artist, finally culminating with a real Molson M brewmaster, Jonathan Lowes. The spot was directed for Industry Films by Dom Bridges, who's represented in the US by Bob Industries. Steven Annis was Director of Photography. Michelle Czukar from Panic and Bob performed the edit.

TATE USA Director Steven Antin–whose GoDaddy.com spots with race car driver Danica Patrick and the sexy girl group Pussycat Dolls will be front and center during the upcoming Super Bowl broadcast–has an equally sexy new spot out right now for Skyy Vodka.  Cut to a rollicking samba beat, we see women in red latex bodysuits, mostly shot from the waist down, dancing in tight choreography against a yellow background in the spot titled "Skin Tight" from the La Jolla, California agency Lambesis.  Hard to believe there's all this action in a fifteen-second spot.  Antin worked with DP Adam Santelli and choreographer and actress Denise Faye. Rossi Cannon and David Tate were EPs for TATE USA.  The spot was cut by Christopher Willoughby at hybrid and includes VFX from 20twenty VFX.

Prairie Milk is launching the second commercial in a multi-level campaign designed to support kids physically and emotionally. Directed by Mark Zibert of Sons and Daughters and created by the Dare agency in Vancouver, the campaign promotes the tagline "Milk helps keep you going…where you go is up to you. Never Stop. Milk." Taking cues from real life, the spots show youth trying different activities with varying degrees of mediocrity or failure, until they land on that one true thing at which they're truly great. The message is one of perseverance and ties the campaign back to the natural, healthy energy kids get from milk. Matthew Griffiths of Cycle Media edited the spot, which included VFX by Swiss.

Putting on makeup in the morning should not be a dangerous game. In a new ad campaign for Environmental Defence, the Canadian environmental organization, viewers are alerted to the many cancer-causing, hormone-disrupting, and allergy-inducing substances contained in the personal care products they use every day. To raise awareness about the issue, the group partnered with Toronto-based agency Open to create a 60-second spot titled "Try To Look Pretty Without Poisoning Yourself", directed by Partners Films' Aleysa Young.  In it, a game show contestant must choose a cosmetic product that doesn't contain toxins and cancer-causing chemicals. The ad is part of Environmental Defence's ongoing Just Beautiful campaign rallying for safer cosmetics in Canada. The campaign's website offers consumers information about safe products and companies that have pledged that the products they produce or sell are free of the "Toxic Ten", the ten worst ingredients found in personal care products.

How do your kids learn? Many learn through play, and that is demonstrated with warmth, insight and charm in a series of 15-second spots directed by Bob Giraldi of Giraldi Media for the toy company Fisher Price and Y&R, New York.  All reality-based, the spots use kids interacting with various toys and with their real parents.  "There was a genuine connection that came through between the parents and their babies and young kids," says Giraldi's Dennis Loonan. The spots were shot in a close-up, handheld fashion, giving the campaign more of a sense of intimacy, and they feature children from babies to toddlers playing with both moms and dads.  Running from the fall into the holiday season, the spots ran in both the US and abroad and included eight commercials in all (see "Fun Park", "Puppy", "Zoo", and "Big Action" to get a sampling).

Front Row Networks, Inc., a Los Angeles-based concert production and distribution company, has entered into a production financing and distribution agreement with HELLO!, the Los Angeles-based commercial, music video, branded content, entertainment and 3D production company. The first project, to be announced soon, will be distributed first in theaters and then available for all other distribution opportunities worldwide. Kerri Kleiner, Head of Music, Live and 3D (that's her on the left), and Lenny Beckerman, Head of TV and Film, will spearhead this venture for HELLO!.  "As artists are looking to discover innovative ways to reach a bigger audience, 3D concert films will be the next level concert experience," says Kleiner.  "HELLO! is looking forward to reaching that audience with the experience of Front Row Networks in the live concert production and distribution sectors."

Director Michael Cuesta, who directs commercials through The Artists Company in the US, has been nominated for a DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Dramatic Series for the pilot episode of the Showtime series "Homeland".  The show, which just won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Series, stars Claire Danes as a CIA officer who does not trust an American Marine who was held as a POW by Al Qaeda and believes he's now working against the US.  The series has been renewed for an additional 12 episodes.  Cuesta has extensive credits in long-form entertainment and has previously directed episodes of the TV series "Dexter" for Showtime, "Six Feet Under" and "True Blood" for HBO, and "Blue Bloods" for CBS. His feature credits include the acclaimed indie hit "L.I.E."

What the frack is going on here? That's what some people in the US have been asking themselves about the controversy over the process of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". It's a technique in which water, mixed with a cocktail of various chemicals, is pumped into underground rock formations to fracture the rock and release natural gas deposits. A group of young editors and designers at the L.A.-based production company Pictures in a Row got together with a college friend from NYU and created an animated, type-driven music video to a rap song called "My Water's On Fire Tonight", a reference to an odd effect of fracking in which flammable gas comes out of water spigots in homes.  The video went online and was an instant hit; Time Magazine even named it "Best Creative Video of the Year" for 2011. PicRow's Editor Lisa Rucker and Designer Adam Sakellarides produced the video based on the song written by David Holmes, with help from Andrew Bean and Niel Bekker.

Thornberg & Forester (T&F), the New York-based design and production company, has announced the debut of the studio's first original series for the web. The shop is now in production on "Fresh Produce", a ten-episode series being produced for the Cooking Channel.  "We conceived the show as a way to use our live action, animation and VFX talents to cost-effectively create short, informative programs," says T&F Partner Justin Meredith, who's leading the project as CD and director. The studio also scored a major coup last year when its work for Conservation International (a logo frame grab appears here) was chosen to appear in "Identities", a new book about design published by the renowned graphic design firm Chermayeff & Geismar. Other major accomplishments of the studio include creating out of home work for ING Direct via Berlin Cameron United that appeared in Times Square, as well as contributing to campaigns for the TNT and TBS channels, retail chain REI, and the tech employment web site Dice.com.

We're number one. That's what they're saying over at BBDO after the network won top honors for 2011 from The Directory Big Won, the annual ranking of creative work across all media, that's compiled by The Directory, Ltd., the UK-based review of direct marketing campaigns.  The Big Won is compiled from approximately 6,000 awards handed out at key shows around the world, and ranks agencies and ads in a variety of categories. In the rankings, BBDO came in with the top-rated TV campaign of the year, the "Who Killed Deon?" interactive spots for London's Metropolitan Police, created by AMV BBDO and directed by Simon Ellis for Mad Cow Films (pictured here). BBDO New York took first place among all agency offices, according to The Directory Big Won rankings. The top ten included, in order, Almap BBDO, Sao Paulo; Y&R Dubai; Jung von Matt, Hamburg; Colenso BBDO, Auckland; AMV BBDO, London; Forsman & Bodenfors, Gothenburg; Ogilvy, Frankfurt; Serviceplan, Munich; and Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne.

Lana Kim has brought her extensive experience in music videos to Furlined. Prior to joining Furlined, she was the Executive Producer of music videos for seven years at The Directors Bureau. "I've been a big fan of the directors at Furlined for years," says Kim. "They're unique and outstanding talents and their work expresses their creative integrity. I can't wait to make some memorable projects with them."  A media multitasker, Kim also hosts the online music video show "The Lana Show", featuring interviews with bands and music video directors, as well as showcasing some of her personal favorites in the genre. Recently, Kim founded Hundreds + Thousands, where she will continue to develop creative talent for music videos while also exploring and cultivating work beyond the traditional music video realm.

Editor Patrick Griffin is joining jumP L.A. Griffin's editing was most recently seen in a Kia spot featuring NBA star Blake Griffin, directed by Prettybird Director Paul Hunter.  Griffin joins the studio from Arcade Edit, also having spent time at Harley's House and Lost Planet with current jumP L.A. Executive  Producer Betsy Beale. Comments jumP Managing Director Dee Tagert, "I first met Patrick a couple of years ago and am now so thrilled to have him on board with us in L.A.  I will enjoy his coming out to cut with us in New York, too. He's an incredible talent, plus a wonderful human being."

Producing content for today's high-gloss Fashion & Beauty brands is a highly specialized process that demands the utmost in production craftsmanship along with maddening attention to detail and, of course, a great sense of taste and style. One of the best ways to promote your work in this hotly competitive category is to sponsor our "Glam Masters" SourceEcreative Special Feature on Fashion & Beauty Production.  It's the perfect opportunity for production and post experts in cosmetics, skin care, hair, apparel, and fragrance advertising to raise their awareness and showcase their work. Our 2010 Fashion & Beauty Special was a huge success, so don't miss out on the chance to strut your stuff before our global audience of agency and production professionals. For more information on sponsorship packages, contact Halyce Naparstek at hnaparstek@sourceecreative.com, or call +1-561-206-0728. For a complete list of our 2012 Special Features, click here.