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How do you market to a vampire? That’s the challenge interactive agency Digital Kitchen faced as they created a series of fang-in-cheek ads to promote HBO’s smash show True Blood. Using applications such as Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite, the all-Mac shop produced billboards and print ads for brands like MINI and Gillette, and a collection of darkly humorous online viral videos revealing that, after all, vampires are people too.

Erykah Badu is awash in creative energy. She conjures the stuff from thin air, whipping up hooks and melodies with little more than a basic backing track. Think soulful freestyle riffs and lyrics punctuated by the boom and clack of a jazzy drum kit. Yet even a steady stream of creativity like Badu’s can be diverted—for days, weeks, months, or years. In fact, five years passed without a new Badu album. Some said she had writer’s block. Some said she had lost her groove. Turns out the vibe was alive the whole time—it simply needed a new channel to flow into.

Greg Laswell’s soulful acoustic sound is laced with bright guitar riffs and stirring, natural vocals. It’s easy to picture Laswell perched on a worn chair with an old Martin guitar, scrawling verses, chord progressions, and solos onto a yellow legal pad. But you’re more likely to find Laswell hunched over his MacBook, strumming and singing into GarageBand, which the musician uses to scribble aural ideas, flesh out full songs, and even record demos for record label execs.

Few DJs can electrify a crowd like Paul van Dyk. That connection was originally analog—all of his grooves were etched into a few tons of vinyl. But for about three years now van Dyk has been strictly digital. Today he conjures his sets on a pair of MacBook Pros using Logic Studio and Ableton Live. In fact, it probably isn’t accurate to call him a “DJ” anymore. Van Dyk weaves his own music real-time, like any live musician. He uses his dance-floor sixth sense and his skills as a renowned producer to create new tracks during every performance.

You’d expect an international super band like Fall Out Boy to write all its music in a massive audio laboratory, a studio crammed with enough gadgetry to make the guys at NASA jealous. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fall Out Boy cooks up multi-platinum hits with GarageBand and a few MacBook Pros. The band’s lead singer and rhythm guitarist, Fall Out Boy, composes and records his demos almost exclusively with GarageBand. In fact, most of the band’s chart-smashing hits were written on his MacBook Pro using a combination of GarageBand software instruments and live recordings. And if that wasn’t enough, Stump also uses GarageBand to compose for other groups, including Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes. In every case, his tracks only hit pro studios for finishing touches and polishing. GarageBand is Stump’s main means for making music.

Whether he’s throwing out a staccato stream of rhymes or sounding out some smooth vocals, T-Pain’s style is unmistakable. The title of his debut album “Rappa Ternt Sanga” sums it up. T-Pain strives to bring hip-hop and R&B together without compromise. And it works — Five Grammy nominations and a run of solid-gold albums testify to the fact.

It all becomes clear at 200 miles an hour. That’s when the serene scream of precision-tuned MotoGP bikes resonates with race fans across the globe, summoning a visceral need for speed that can only be satisfied by breathtaking footage, exhilarating audio and complete coverage. The team at Dorna Sports delivers, serving up a medley of sensational media to satisfy the most serious speed junkies. For all intents and purposes, Dorna is MotoGP. The Madrid and Barcelona-based media company covers the races worldwide, from Spain to Qatar to California. It has more than 120 full-time staff members. Its camera operators cover every curve of the track. Its timekeepers track race progress. Its engineers have designed on-bike cameras to give spectators a behind-the-bars view of every race. Its editing team cuts live footage for more than 40 networks across the globe. And after every event, its editors stitch the best footage together for network TV spots and a DVD using Final Cut Studio.

To a serious cyclist, a bike isn’t just a set of wheels. It’s an extension of bone and muscle, a projection of personality in motion. It’s not merely a machine, it’s personal. That’s why the design team at Trek built Project One, an online workshop where cyclists can fully customize their bikes — from parts to paint schemes — with a click of a mouse. “My personal bike is pink and black with white decals,” says Eric Lynn, designer and avid cyclist at Trek. “To me it says, ‘This is a fun ride, let’s take it easy and have a great time.’ Other people might want a stealthy monotone bike that says they’re in it for going fast. With Project One, everybody can figure out their own message.”

It doesn’t get much more serious than South Park. Not that the show is dull or somber. It simply has the most manic production schedule of any animated series on television — probably ever. “We work between 100 and 120 hours in a seven-day week to deliver the episodes,” says Frank Agnone, supervising producer at South Park Studios in Los Angeles. “We’re moving unbelievably fast right out of the gate.”

Brian Eno paints with light. And his paintings, like the medium, shift and dance like free-flowing jazz solos or elaborate ragas. In fact, they have more in common with live music than they do with traditional artwork. “When I started working on visual work again, I actually wanted to make paintings that were more like music,” he says. “That meant making visual work that nonetheless changed very slowly.” Eno has been sculpting and bending light into living paintings for about 25 years, rigging galleries across the globe with modified televisions, programmed projectors, and three-dimensional light sculptures.