The work of Digital Kitchen is hard to categorize—especially if you eliminate "darn good" as a category. Sometimes it's live action, sometimes it's motion graphics and usually it's a mixture of both. But whatever the medium, the method is always the same: put the brand up front and make it the star of the show.

The firm began ten years ago as a side project of co-founder Paul Matthaeus. At the time he was a partner in a successful advertising agency in Seattle. But advertising wasn't his first or only love: Matthaeus also had a degree in photography and had worked as a graphic artist. It was a hands-on background that gave him a detailed command of the production process. And an idea.

"[In advertising] the tendency is to componentize the disciplines of the agency," he says. "You hire a composer, you hire an editor, you hire a design firm and you bring all those separate people together and you hope some kind of magic arises out of it."

Matthaeus felt it would be easier to capture that magic if you didn't separate out the different parts of the production process. Instead he wanted to put everything—writers, composers, directors, editors and designers—into play as soon as possible and try to catch the intangible as it happened.

But for that he needed his own production team. So Matthaeus fitted out a storage room next to his agency's kitchen, bought a few computers, and brought in some bright people to work on them. Their first project was a sales film for an exercise equipment company and, if nothing else, it was a learning process.

It took us a psychotic amount of time," he admits. "But the important part was the collaboration between live action, design and editorial. We directed the live action and we also directed the music for the piece. The whole time we were working with all those disciplines simultaneously."

For the record the project was a big success. At its first screening—to a roomful of sales representatives—it received a standing ovation. Matthaeus knew he was on to something, and he soon began sending out tapes of DK's work. One of them eventually landed on the desk of Don McNeill, a young executive at Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago. Like Matthaeus, McNeill had come to advertising in a roundabout way. He was a broadcast major, who had spent the first eight years of his career in Los Angeles, producing content for television. During that time he had often found himself hiring a new kind of company: a hybrid design firm that produced motion graphics and live action.

"What those guys brought was a consistent creative vision," he says.

But now that McNeill was working in advertising, he found he needed more than graphics and typography. He needed someone who could take those things and make them work strategically. And from his first conversation with Matthaeus, he was impressed.

"We got [Paul] on the phone," says McNeill, "and I knew right away he was the guy. Clearly, he was much more strategic than other graphic designers. The questions he asked were 180 degrees from what we'd heard before."

After collaborating on a pitch for Sears, the two continued to talk. It turned out that both of them wanted to bring something more to advertising than a traditional production company. And they also wanted to bring more to entertainment than a typical motion graphics firm.

"The biggest thing that Paul and I bring to the table is we've always had this vision of combining entertainment and advertising," says McNeill. "You wouldn't believe it but when we're working in entertainment, all these people want our branding prowess...at the same time, the agencies in the ad community love the glitz and glamour we bring from Hollywood."

Within a year McNeill had secured financing for a new venture, and Matthaeus had divested himself of his advertising agency. They reopened Digital Kitchen with offices in Seattle and Chicago and almost immediately began serving top brands and clients.

The company has followed a "successful agency" script ever since. With Matthaeus largely directing the creative end, and McNeill largely taking care of business, Digital Kitchen has prospered. They now have around 70 employees, a new office in Los Angeles, and a growth plan.

Their work straddles entertainment and advertising and ranges from Emmy-winning title sequences for HBO to ads that play during the Super Bowl. Overall, they advocate a kind of brand-focused experience—or as McNeill puts it, "The idea really is for the brand to be the hero of the spot."

It's an approach that's easy to see in DK's recent "Origami" ad for Quikrete. The company makes a family of construction products which are used in just about every building around. To bring that point home, DK created a spot in which a piece of paper, emblazoned with the Quikrete logo, unfolds origami-style to create familiar-looking buildings and bridges. It's fun, it's effective and it covers the screen with the Quikrete brand.

On a larger scale, it's better to look at a series of spots DK recently produced for Budweiser. They came on the heels of the highly successful, but not terrifically beer-focused "Whassup" campaign.

"The pendulum was swinging at the brewery," says Matthaeus, "and they were tired of gags...They wanted something that celebrated the effervescent gold liquid they worked so hard to create."

As with any project, DK followed a rough process with a few broad guidelines. It began with Matthaeus's mantra of putting every part of the team together as early as possible. Next, they devised a number of different ways to present the beer, one of which seemed to grab everyone's attention.

"We essentially came upon this idea of having a corona created from a drop of liquid—a high-speed Eggleston-like corona," he says. "That was the signature and we worked back from there, creating storylines where a Bud consumer is having fantastic visions of this corona being formed in beer foam."

From there DK used a technique Matthaeus calls post-visualization. It comes from one of his heroes, photographer Jerry Uelsmann. Long before Photoshop, Uelsmann would shoot hundreds of photos and then use darkroom techniques to combine them into surrealistic images. Likewise Matthaeus instructed his directors to get plenty of extra footage so that they could be prepared to change directions radically at the end.

"Have an initial vision," he says, "but also have the balls to set it aside when you step in to finish it—and allow that to be a creative process as well."

The end result was exactly what they wanted. In the first spot, for example, a young man is sitting in a stylish bar about to enjoy a glass of Budweiser. As he's looking down on it, suddenly the beer itself starts to swirl into a whirlwind, going faster and faster and finally pops its foam head into the shape of a crown, or corona. The young man then starts out of his reverie.

"From there we went on and blew it out," says Matthaeus. "We did a summer version, a music version and we ended up doing a global version."

But as successful as spots like these are, McNeill and Matthaeus have their eyes on something grander. With the growth in Tivo and other entertainment on-demand formats, they see the 30-second spot eventually going away. In its place, they're pushing a concept they call Brand Theatre.

"The traditional idea is that advertisers can expect to interrupt people's entertainment," says Matthaeus. "Instead you need to think of them wanting to see your entertainment...the idea is to think more in terms of having the brand being entertainment in and of itself."

What exactly that will look like when it finally happens is not perfectly clear, but McNeill has hinted that they have a few projects in the works that may prove the concept. Until then, there's still plenty of traditional DK work to ogle and enjoy. ca