For a woman who made a career out of directing documentaries, including Geisha and Naked Nashville, director Joanna Bailey has surprisingly harsh words for the genre. "Craftsmanship has just gone out the window in England," she opines, citing one of her reasons for leaving nonfiction filmmaking. "People are not interested in documentaries anymore; they just want to watch Big Brother and quiz shows."
As the public appetite for documentaries has diminished in the U.K., so has Bailey’s. She mourns the dumbing down of the genre. "Now that they have to be narrated, there’s absolutely no subtlety in the storytelling," she observes. "You used to be able to allow shots to breathe, and people could make their own conclusions."
But the genre’s loss is the ad world’s gain: Bailey, who is represented by Serious Pictures, London, is embarking on a career directing commercials in the United States—she’s repped stateside by CMP, bicoastal and Chicago—having worked on spots for Nike, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the New York City public school system. Making the switch is requiring her to learn new tricks, but she’s bringing over a few of her own from the world of documentaries. "I’m very excited and stimulated by commercials because it’s quite new to me," states Bailey.
Originally from Dublin, Bailey moved to London in 1990, working as a researcher, and later as an assistant producer on documentaries. She started directing on her own in ’95, helming projects for the BBC and Britain’s Channel 4 that centered around the arts, and later on more human interest-oriented themes. From geishas to country music to boxing, she has tackled a diverse range of topics in the past.
Bailey has consistently employed a style combining haunting soundtracks with languorous camerawork that studies its subjects intently. Narration and dialogue take a backseat to telltale physical details. When Bailey captures a blinking eye or a pursed lip that seems to last only milliseconds, even the stoic geisha betrays the innermost thoughts she is trained to hide.
After her work on Naked Nashvillee drew the attention of pop singer George Michael—who recruited her to direct the video for his remake of the Police classic "Roxanne"—Bailey joined Serious Pictures, which represents her to this day. Through Serious, she has been able to branch out beyond documentaries.
Breaking Through
Bailey’s style is catching on in the U.S. ad market, and she’s picking up a few new techniques of her own from working on stateside fare. She recently helmed a soon-to-air spot for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, out of Cramer-Krasselt, Chicago. Featuring images of faces on the computer screens through which the futures trading marketplace enables online transactions, Bailey cuts and layers the footage using blue screen technology. "I’ve never been a big fan of blue screen before," she notes. "It’s a totally different way of working, but I’m learning so much."
The adjustment wasn’t always easy. On her first commercial shoot, several years ago—"Tickertape" and "Bottle" for the British newspaper Independent, out of Euro RSCG Wenk Gosper, London—she learned the hard way about the more collaborative nature of making ads. "Right there on the set, there were people questioning the way I shot," she recalls. "The whole experience was something very alien to me. I thought, ‘Oh, they don’t think I’m very good,’ and I took it very personally just because I wasn’t used to it. It was quite difficult for me in the beginning.
"In documentaries, a channel will commission you and let you go off and do your thing," Bailey continues, "and then at the end they come into the cutting room. In commercials, it’s all about them being with you the whole time."
But with time and experience Bailey has grown fond of her new collaborative approach, and relishes the input of American agencies. She also enjoys working with bigger budgets and crews, but other facets of shooting still present challenges now and then. Her work last year on "Swimmer"—one of four spots she directed for Nike’s "Dear Mexico" campaign, through Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore.—involved deploying a hawk lens to shoot a fast-moving swimmer, which made it difficult to focus the camera. But patience paid off, and "Swimmer" offers visually arresting images of a woman doing her laps with ferocious intensity. The package, which also included the ads ""Big Sister," "Kitchen" and "Kick Boxing," was the first set of TV spots that Nike had aimed specifically at Mexico’s female population, which numbers about 52 million. Like "Swimmer," all of the ads show women engaged in sport, while a voiceover reads a letter to Mexico, detailing women’s involvement in athletics.
For "Field Trip," one of several spots she directed for the New York City Board of Education, Bailey was able to lean on her documentary experience. The ads, out of TBWA/ Chiat/Day, New York, aim to recruit teachers, and Bailey coaxed performances from the real students and educators featured in the :30. "I love collaborating with real people because they’re such a pleasure to work with," she states. "They don’t have that actor-y thing; they’re much more natural. When I can, I like to do street casting."
As comfortable as she is starting to be with commercials, sometimes she gets nostalgic for documentaries. "I do miss the independence of that kind of work," relates Bailey. "My natural tendency is to cut things slow and allow things to breathe. I love a bit of tragedy and poignancy."
