The role of an editor is, essentially, to tell a story by bringing disparate narrative pieces together into a cohesive whole. Founded by a trio of editors in 1995, post-production boutique Northern Lights has for two decades performed that role exceedingly well, creating the narrative of promo efforts ranging from VH1’s I Love the 2000s to the rousing opening number of the last three seasons of NBC Sports’ Sunday Night Football.

Along the way, the essence and craft of editing has infused not only the work Northern Lights does, but the very way by which its current partners Mark Littman and David Gioiella run their business. As demand has increased over the decades, they have, like most successful companies, added new services to continue growing and innovating. But where most companies develop and present new services under the given company’s own brand and name, Northern Lights’ expanded offerings have each been built as a new and distinctive brand.

Today, there are four individual production-related divisions operating under the Northern Lights umbrella, each with its own company name, website and logo: The design-focused creative production studio Mr. Wonderful; the content creation company Bodega; the audio mixing, sound design and music composition house SuperExploder; and Northern Lights itself. Each one operates and conducts itself as an individual entity, but like any well-edited promo, it’s when Northern Lights brings them all together that the magic happens.

Friends from their days as students at Northwestern University, partners David Gioiella and Mark Littman (and a third partner, Phil Bruell, who has since passed away) jumped directly into the broadcast TV arena outside of college. As early adopters of the Avid non-linear editing system, their early work on MTV reality shows like Diary and Cribs helped define the look and feel of the burgeoning wave of unscripted television, pumping up footage in post with fast cuts, multiple layers, dips to black, speed re-vamps and heavy color correcting.

“All the things that are common to editorial language now… That became part of our voice,” said Littman. “Our storytelling involved a very heavy visual component that became what we were known for.”

In the beginning, as young creative types tend to do, they tried a little bit of everything.

“Rather than specializing in promos or commercials or TV shows, we wanted to do interesting projects that had a unique editorial component to them,” said Gioiella, including feature films, documentaries and even music videos for the jam band Phish.

Casting a wide creative net “opened up doors for us,” said Gioiella, which, due to Northern Lights’ energetic, fast-paced style, seemed to continuously lead them back to promo, and lots of it. Soon they were expanding their office to a new space in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The bigger they got, the more clients requested additional services, including motion graphics, visual effects, logos and other design elements. That demand led to the company’s first divisional expansion in 2005, opening the design-heavy Mr. Wonderful. Bodega, and its roster of directors capable of crafting commercials, promos, digital initiatives and more, came next. And then in 2012, the final piece was added to this four-part engine of multifaceted production – the audio mixing, sound design and original music composition house SuperExploder.

Why Northern Lights expanded with new sub-companies instead of expanding its own main company is “something we get asked a lot,” said Littman. “It goes to the core of our philosophy about this whole business.”

When he and Gioiella added the graphics capabilities of Mr. Wonderful, for instance, “we didn’t want to just check a box and say, ‘OK, now we have graphics. It was important for us to follow the same path we did with our roots in editorial and make it as best in class as we possibly could. That really demanded giving it its own identity, its own market, its own logo.”

At the same time, when clients do seek all-in-one services, as they are doing with increasing frequency in the modern age, Northern Lights’ structure “gives us a very deep well to draw from to meet that demand in the best possible way,” said Littman.

With the addition of Bodega and its capacity to generate productions from the ground up, Northern Lights has increasingly looked to unify its quadrant of assets around a common goal, often brainstorming larger-scale projects that are even “more holistic than what the client is asking for,” said Littman. This process was exemplified by a joint effort on Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect, a project that began with Bodega-created promotional spots grounded in live-action and dialogue that strongly featured the show’s talent, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

During production, it soon became clear that the network would also need to execute a show opening and design package, at which point Mr. Wonderful was able to step in.

“In a very seamless way,” said Gioiella, “we were able to move from a live-action scripted dialogue spot to a graphic-driven open that felt like it crossed over that same visual language and tone… by working through our different divisions we were able to approach it holistically, pitch them ideas for the show launch, and then carry over that creative thought to the show open and execute it all in-house.”

After nearly 20 years of consistent success and growth, Northern Lights may be done adding divisions, at least for the time being. Its focus now is editing its cumulative powers into that cohesive whole. Recently, the company has accomplished that with co-branded spots for clients such as USA, and its Graceland/Toyota integration, as well as for a work-in-progress involving a BBC America/Mercedes partnership. In these projects, said Gioiella, all four companies come together to “take our knowledge of the advertising world and our knowledge of promotions and then leverage those together in away that creates a spot that doesn’t suffer from either side but is fun to watch… This co-branded [space] has enabled us to leverage our skills into work that’s really fun. We have so many specialties in these different areas that can all come together on one project. That’s kind of exciting.”

Tags:


  Save as PDF