The Briefing Room

CHICAGO-vitamin, the Chicago-based production studio, has something new to offer advertising agencies, broadcasters and others seeking a fresh approach toward media production. It’s called Döppler.

Döppler is the alter ego of vitamin director Ryan Dunn and art director Elliot Lim. The pair have begun working together as a directorial team, applying their imaginative blend of design, illustration and animation techniques to several varied projects, and offering a concept-through-completion approach to their productions.

The idea for Döppler arose when Dunn and Lim collaborated on an animated spot for Microsoft’s Zune, part of a series of viral films for an online campaign. In the spot, a young couple meets at a sidewalk café and soon find themselves floating up into the stratosphere, where they are surrounded by clouds that look like cut-out set pieces and from a stage production.

Dunn and Lim subsequently teamed up on several more projects, including spots for Steelcase and Smile Faucet, each of which employed a similarly fanciful style of animation and magical feel. In the latter, a girl wanders into a forest to release fireflies that were trapped in a bottle. “The kind of project that we like has a little longer narrative,” Dunn said. “You could call it whimsical storytelling.”



The results have been a hit among both clients and consumers. Formalizing the collaborative partnership into the directorial duo Döppler was the next logical step. “vitamin has been moving toward a production company model of late, and, as an individual director, I have been doing more live-action work,” explained Dunn, whose recent credits as a solo live-action director include a current spot for Cheerios. “Döppler is a way for Elliot and I to continue to do illustrated, animated, design-focused work, which has also been very successful for us.”

Döppler’s most recent effort is a short film titled Bottoms Up, a darkly comic tale about a pill being marched to his watery doom. The pair plan to put it out on the festival circuit this fall.

Dunn is a graduate of the Minneapolis College of Design and began his career with the Los Angeles design studio Blind. He later formed his own design studio, Spinal Chord, which specialized in web design, before joining Digital Kitchen in Chicago, where he rose to Associate Creative Director. He also worked as an art director at Nike in Portland for two years before coming aboard vitamin in 2004, where he now heads its creative team.

Lim joined vitamin shortly after graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2005, having completed his undergraduate work at UCLA.

The success of Döppler is a credit to vitamin’s creative approach which is to be agnostic with regard to technique and maintain a willingness to allow its creative staff to take chances. “A lot of it is the team we’ve built and the style of work we do,” said Dunn. “Elliot is a good example. He came on when we launched vitamin as an animator and we’ve given him an opportunity to collaborate on these cool projects. It helped to spark the creativity and the Döppler style.”

vitamin is located at 216 W. Ohio Street, 5th floor, Chicago, IL 60610. For more information, call (312) 664-6683 or visit www.vitaminpictures.tv.