DUSTIN SCHIRER

BARKLEY FILMS

Head of Barkley Films / Creative Production Director
Barkley

I spent more than a decade building Barkley Films, the in-house production team at Barkley.

When I started, the team was me.

My first week also happened to be the week Barkley learned Sonic, its largest client and more than half of the agency’s revenue at the time, was leaving. So, yeah. Awesome.

New business became everything.

For the next few years, I worked alongside creative teams and the C-suite on nearly every pitch we could chase. Manifesto films, mood pieces, spec work, whatever helped turn an idea in a conference room into something a prospective client could actually see and feel.

For one Dairy Queen pitch alone, our team created 62 different pieces of video content. For a client we did not even have yet.

New business was not a side project.

That work became the foundation for Barkley Films.

What started as one person making pitch films grew into a full in-house production team of more than 10 people at its peak. Producers, directors, editors, motion designers, shooters, sound designers, and other very talented humans who genuinely loved making things move.

We built the team around a pretty simple idea: move fast without making the work feel fast.

Over time, Barkley Films became a bit of a secret weapon inside the agency. We could jump into a new business pitch and make an idea feel real before it had any business feeling real. We could help creative teams figure out how to make something weird. And because the team was right down the hall, we could move quickly when an opportunity showed up without sacrificing the craft of the work.

That eventually expanded well beyond new business. Client productions. Internal meetings. Recruiting. Culture pieces. Case studies. Agency reels. Big announcements. Weird little ideas someone needed made by Friday. If Barkley needed to say something with video, there was a pretty good chance our team was involved.

Add Good was a manifesto built around a pretty simple belief at Barkley: use what we do to put a little more good into the world.

The creative was rooted in Barkley’s culture, and the idea was to make every word by hand. Literally.

I worked alongside a group of ridiculously talented creatives and craftspeople, figuring out how to build and capture everything practically. Every word became its own little production problem to solve, with very little interest in taking the easy way out.

It was complicated, tactile, occasionally ridiculous, and completely handmade.

Barkley needed a film to talk about our B Corp goals, beliefs, and the impact we wanted to have as a company.

Barkley also happened to have a long history with rockets and space baked into the brand.

So we found an astronaut suit, recruited a few employees, and spent a day running around Kansas City making our version of an impact film.

Scheduling an astronaut shoot during peak Kansas City summer was a choice. The person inside the suit would probably use a different word.