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MillimeterKeeping it Green
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
A content-driven gamble pays off for Kontentreal.
Brainchild of advertising veterans Tad Fettig and Karena Albers, kontentreal produces documentaries that raise awareness of global environmental issues.
Tad Fettig met Karena Albers on a deodorant shoot in Hawaii. Both were veterans of the advertising world — Fettig as a commercial cinematographer specializing in rigorous location shoots for clients including Levi's and The North Face, Albers out of DDB in Chicago. Albers had already started to rethink traditional ad creative strategies, championing the blending of brand strategy and entertainment at the agency and independently. Brainstorming with Fettig, she realized she could reinvent advertising for the greater good of goods and services, or she could reinvent herself with an entrepreneurial approach to telling stories she actually cared about.
For a time, Fettig didn't really believe Albers would move east to New York to join him in the business they wanted to call kontentreal (as in “real content”). In 2003, she did.
The roots of kontentreal go back to a Greenpeace reality-show project Fettig shot for his previous partnership kontent, founded with Mark Decena and Tim Breitbach, who took the feature Dopamine to Sundance in 2003. While kontent took a wide range of work, much of it from Fettig's more traditional contacts (“bullshit advertising stuff,” Fettig says), the idea for kontentreal was to commit to stories that reflected the founders' ideals. The plan was to raise awareness of global environmental issues through a strategic entertainment and documentary company. Fettig and Albers knew a lot about persuasive storytelling and about extending the life of a story through strategic marketing. With the global conversation about environmental issues growing more practical, and with the proliferation of digital and online media, the timing seemed to be right. More or less.
Among kontentreal's projects is e2 design, a six-part documentary series on sustainable architecture, narrated by Brad Pitt. Pictured: Tad Fettig.
Three years later, kontentreal debuted its first episodic HD series on PBS, e
The journey from deodorant to Borneo, Bangladesh, Brazil, and one of the most remote places on earth — Ladakh, India — made for adventurous workdays and satisfying storytelling; the journey to the screen was itself an adventure of the entrepreneurial kind.
Initially, Fettig says, he and Albers decided to stake six months of their personal savings on success. They went to work writing up ideas and making treatment books. Somewhat naively, Fettig says, they went the corporate route looking for sponsors. More successfully, they leveraged their existing contacts at Sundance Channel and PBS, although nothing initially that was a sure thing. “The way public television works is they assume you have funding to make and deliver the program you're offering them, and your sponsors like to know you have distribution before they fund your program,” he says. It's a bit of a game of chicken that, in this case, worked out.
Aging wind farms in California, from season two of e2 design, which is scheduled to air on PBS in November.
The underwriting sponsorship ended up coming from an unexpected source. Autodesk had been working to enable more environmentally conscious design (what the company calls “smart design”) through designer education and through features the company was building into its CAD programs. With kontentreal's practical approach to the subject matter, it felt like a match; Autodesk underwrote the first season of e
In 2004, with a modest budget in hand, the kontentreal team decided that rather than go with a typical PBS production company, they would make the series themselves, in HD — first with a Panasonic Varicam equipped with the P+S Technik Pro35 adapter that allowed them to shoot with various Canon primes, a Carl Zeiss 14mm, and an Angenieux 10:1 zoom. The combination allowed for “a traditional film vocabulary look,” Fettig says, one that gave them the depth of field they wanted for what would be a frequently sweeping and cinematic approach to filming.
Later, the team, led by DP Rob Humphrey, transitioned to the Panasonic AJ-HDX900 and started to use P2 AG-HVX200s, a particular boon for intimate shoots in parts of the world where a shoulder-mount camera can be conspicuous. P+S Technik's Mini35 adapter (“incredible,” Fettig says) helped ensure successful intercutting. Even with his cinematograher's eye, Fettig says that after color correction, he couldn't tell the difference.
The 200s also allowed the team to incorporate a more vérité style as they moved somewhat away from the initial panoramic, glossy sweep of the original look, combining the big composed shots with human detail gleaned in conversations with unconventional activists, underpublicized innovators, and low-key revolutionaries.
Morning prayers and exercises before class at Druk White Lotus School in Ladakh, India, from season two of e2 design.
The transition from tape to P2 was another small revelation, Fettig says, and the team didn't lose a single frame. Postproduction was three editors on Avid Media Composer Adrenaline and Mojo on a Unity SAN; color and conform was done at a Chicago facility on DS Nitris.
For Fettig and Albers, this looks like the ingredients of dreams come true. Fettig is a self-described wanderer, so roaming the globe for stories sounds about right. Albers cites an appetite for the marketplace, where her pragmatic activism can extend into all the corners, forums, and side streets of media messaging and distribution she could envision from the skyscrapers of corporate advertising.
The new kontentreal series, e
