That’s really what I love to do: play with space and play with time," says Erick Ifergan, who directs spots through Serial Dreamer, West Hollywood, a satellite of bicoastal Believe Media. "That’s what makes me wake up in the morning: to direct, to cut and to manipulate film."
Ifergan has been manipulating film quite a bit. Some of his recent credits include Sony PlayStation 2’s "PlayStation 9," via TBWA/Chiat/ Day, San Francisco; Nintendo’s "One Boy," out of Leo Burnett USA, Chicago; and "Heart," "Focus" and "Ascend" for Goldman Sachs, through Grey Advertising, New York. Additionally, Ifergan, has directed several campaigns for Mitsubishi, out of Deutsch, Los Angeles, and recently completed three new ads for the automaker. They are: "Trojan Horse," "Broadway Joe" and "Chatroom."
The French native is intrigued with questions like, "Is it really the people that are moving in the space, or is it the space moving around the people?" That question seems less abstract if you’ve seen Ifergan’s impressive reel: a collection of spectacular spots in which space and architecture usually have starring roles. "PlayStation 9" is a perfect example of Ifergan’s aesthetic. The ad is set in the year 2078 and promotes PlayStation 2 by way of creating an ad for the as-yet-nonexistent PlayStation 9. The commercial’s first image immediately establishes a sci-fi setting—a detailed cityscape evocative of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Cut to shots of a young man in futuristic garb, holding and opening a transparent ball marked with a "PS9" logo. Then bubbles are released from the orb and hover momentarily before entering the young man’s body through his nose.
It is rev ealed through a seductive voiceover that the bubbles are "electronic spores" that "tap straight into your adrenal gland." Matrix-like images flash by as the PS9’s features are revealed: "improved retinal scanning; a mind-control system; holographic, movie-surround vision; and telepathic personal music." Then a cool female voice intones: "The ultimate just got better. PlayStation 9. Teleport yours today." An image of PS9 fades to black and we see PS2. The closing text: "PS2: the beginning."
The cityscape in the spot was partially composed of images of Hong Kong. "I had just come back from Hong Kong [before that project]," relates Ifergan. "I was fascinated by the ancient roads and streets juxtaposed with the amazing moder n buildings. I proposed to shoot there and create a future that would be a mix of the past and the future.
"Starting from that, every frame was designed," he continues. "To create the space and the science fiction aspect of it was quite easy. We did it in many stages. The first stage was at the shoot, when we had the postproduction people with us. We knew we had to compose a new city with what we had, so I was picking buildings and picking streets. They had to put them t ogether to create one space."
More of Ifergan’s visually impressive work can be seen in the three Mitsubishi campaigns he has directed. For the first, the agency wanted to combine humorous copy with unusual images of the car. The director explains that his "challenge was to shoot a car in a way that had never been done before. What we did is spend fifteen days experimenting with stock and lenses. We developed a style for Mitsubishi based on that."
On his second campaign for the cars, the shop wanted a sense of the drivers. "They wanted to get a sense of people, but in a very abstract way," reports Ifergan. "We started to shoot very abstract images and juxtapose those with images of the car shot in the same kind of experimental way. It created a really interesting language for Mitsubishi. We had this copy and those images that were not necessarily completely illustrative of the words. But in a weird way, the collage was working really well."
In "Shaft," part of Ifergan’s most recent Mitsubishi effort, the eponymous character from the film is evoked though indirect visual means. Only a couple images of Shaft are seen in this stylish black-and-white commercial: a below-the-knees shot of him striding down the street and a close-up of his shoes being shined. Other images feature the Mits ubishi Eclipse Spider darting through nighttime city streets. The voiceover concludes: "Introducing the all-new Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider. So bad, it’s good."
At the age of 15, Ifergan began dabbling in photography. "Put words and image s together," he observes, referring to his background, "and you get film. Some people are real photographers. I was not a real photographer; I think I was a filmmaker even when I was doing photography."
Ifergan got the chance to make his images move when he started to direct music videos in the ’80s for the likes of Tori Amos, Isaac Hayes and Shawn Colvin. "Becoming a director gave me the possibility to embrace every art?x2014;architecture, painting, sculpture," he states. "At the same time I was learning my craft, I was cultivating myself. I was discovering all the major artists and putting them together."
