Aselton’s most recent project is a European spot, "Naked," for Brylcreem, shot in Prague for WCRS, London. "It was basically about sixty naked Czech guys walking around the streets of Prague," he says. "The Brits love bums. It’s an image spot that’s going to run on European television and theaters."
Aselton enjoyed making a "weird little documentary" a couple of years ago on slamball—basketball on trampolines—for the cable network TNN (now known as Spike TV), and he’s interested in longform work, but not right away. "It’s hard to even think about it just yet," he says. "I’m happy doing what I’m doing."
Neill Blomkamp
For a guy who is only 25 years old, director Neill Blomkamp of Spy Films, Toronto, has spent a lot of time working toward what would become one of this year’s most acclaimed commercials—Nike’s "Evolution" for Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore.
The spot, which treats an athletic shoe in the style that time-lapse photography treats the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, was featured earlier this year at the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.
The basis of the spot—computer-generated visual effects—has been a big part of Blomkamp’s world since he was a teenager. Growing up in South Africa, he started "messing around" with computer graphics and 3-D animation. When he was 18, his family moved to Vancouver, B.C., and Blomkamp began to realize there might be a career in computer-generated effects.
"When I got to Vancouver, I put together a reel and sent it to [Vancouver postproduction and effects company] Rainmaker," he says. He was hired by the shop, and worked there from ’98 to ’01 doing computer-generated, photo-real visual effects for various media, including the opening to the movie 3000 Miles to Graceland.
"Pretty much from the start, I knew I wanted to direct," Blomkamp relates. "So during those three years I was creating spec pieces on the side on digital video with a lot of effects. There was no production value in them, but they looked expensive, which always helps."
Directing some effects-driven music videos followed, and early in ’03, Blomkamp hooked up with some friends from Rainmaker, one of whom, Winston Helgason, had the idea to start a visual effects company with just artists instead of a lot of different levels of management. The company is The Embassy Visual Effects, Vancouver; Helgason serves as president. Blomkamp considers it his home base, although he signed with Spy Films the same year for global representation.
It was a spec piece Blomkamp had done, "Tetra Vaal," that caught the attention of W+K. The short film features a Terminator-like robotic enforcer. "They found that piece somehow," Blomkamp says. "Mark Fitzloff, one of the creative guys at Wieden, wrote a commercial that was never made inspired by that robot. When that fell through, he wrote ‘Crab.’ "
"Crab" is a look at a junkyard soccer match between two crab-like robots. It was followed by "Evolution." Not surprisingly, given his background and early directing work, Blomkamp is considered by many to be a director of effects-intensive spots. He accepts that but at the same time is moving into other areas.
"I’m looking to do a variety of different things," he says. "I have to start breaking out of the just-visual effects mold. I’m working on a short film, Tempbot, which is being funded by W+K and produced by Spy. It stars Linda Carter. It’s very bizarre and incredibly dialogue-based."
He is currently working on a spot for Citroen out of Euro RSCG, London. Blomkamp is close-mouthed about the ad but reveals that it is a mix of live action and CG.
"My focus is—and I think always will be—trying to be as creative as possible," he shares. "Ultimately, I would like to be doing feature films, but that’s quite far down the road. Commercials are a very cool way to earn cash doing potentially very creative work. It’s a very good place to stay for many years."
Michael Downing
Canadian Michael Downing began his directing career in experimental theater north of the border, a medium that led him to filmmaking and then commercial directing.
With a Student Academy Award for his ’02 short film Fine in hand and a reel of offbeat Canadian spots, Downing recently signed with harvest, Santa Monica, and has his sights on the U.S. commercial market. (He continues to be repped in Canada by Radke Films, Toronto.)
Downing’s road from experimental theater to TV commercials is actually straighter than one might initially expect. "I had my own little theater company in Toronto," he explains. "We did physical theater that was mostly movement but also had some dialogue. [The productions] were very minimal and lent themselves to film, so we took some abstract little stories and narratives into locations like abandoned buildings and office spaces and exterior environments and shot them. I had a lot of success with them in the experimental film world. They were screened all over the place."
Finding film an attractive medium, Downing started taking night school film courses. His first narrative short film, Clean Rite Cowboy, was a 20-minute story about a suburban carpet cleaner who comes across his high school sweetheart one day and they reconnect.
"It got nominated for the Canadian Oscar, the Genie," Downing notes. "That kind of sealed it for me. I not only really enjoyed it, I seemed to be telling stories that people really connected to."
His applications to the Canadian Film Center, Toronto, and American Film Institute (AFI), Los Angeles, were accepted and he chose the latter. "I decided I wanted to try my luck in the States," he relates. "I was on scholarship there. I won a scriptwriting contest at the school and I won an Oscar for my graduating short film, [Fine]." Fine centers on a factory worker who questions his life as a husband, father and suburbanite.
While at AFI, Downing started putting together a spec reel of commercials. He got a script from an acquaintance at MacLaren McCann, Toronto, and shot "Spot Removal" for Good Life Fitness Clubs, a Canadian chain. In the piece, a young woman in a Laundromat struggles with getting a stain out of a garment, resorting finally to rubbing it on her washboard abs. The spot eventually aired, and Downing saw the light. "I lucked out" is the way he puts it. "[Commercials] seemed like really sophisticated storytelling and you could actually get paid for it too, whereas a lot of the work I had been doing up till then was just hard to get money for. It was a novelty—the idea that I could actually make a living as a director."
Other MacLaren McCann work Downing directed included "Tattoo" and "Coffee Talk" for Rogers Cable. Both spots feature a pair of young office workers in work situations discussing programming available with the Rogers’ digital package.
For Country Music Television (CMT) and agency Zig, Toronto, Downing directed "Dueling Sitars," a send-up of the scene from the movie Deliverance, with two sitar players from India playing "Dueling Banjos."
Despite his early days in experimental theater and film, Downing naturally gravitates to humor in his commercialwork. "I find that the smartest ideas and the best performance opportunities seem to be in the world of comedy," he remarks. "I would like to do more comedy and develop my voice that way more. At some point, though, I’d like to spread out a little and do some stuff that’s more cinematic."
Downing, who also performed in the theater, feels that his acting experience helps him work with performers. "I think I have a sensitivity to actors," he states, "which helps me create an environment on set where they feel free and can take some risks, which a lot of time is what makes material better."
His theater background also helps with collaborating on scripts. "My background was physical movement," he notes. "I try to pare things down to their simplest elements, where we can communicate with some kind of body language, without having to use dialogue."
Currently, Downing is working on a package of spots for Dempster’s bread out of Zig and trying to move a couple of feature film projects forward. "In Canada, I’ve really gotten to a place where I’m going to start seeing some pretty exciting creative," he says, "but I’m really looking forward to breaking into the American market."
Tim Greenberg
Director Tim Greenberg, who earlier this year signed with Park Pictures, New York, has only one spot on his reel: "Catalog of Pain #134" for Tylenol, and frankly, he is surprised that the folks at Tylenol actually like it. The spot didn’t come about through the normal process. Having seen a popular short film he created, Tylenol picked Greenberg to make a film about pain to be screened at this year’s New York Underground Film Festival, which Tylenol was sponsoring.
The spot follows a young woman, obviously in some distress, on her way to a doctor’s appointment. All the while, a stick puppet repeatedly asks her how she feels and if she’s better yet. At the doctor’s office, the physician asks her to describe the pain, offering her several adjectives. The one she finally responds to is "nagging."
The short film that brought Greenberg to Tylenol’s attention was La Puppé, a gentle parody of Chris Marker’s ’62 classic French short La Jetée. Greenberg’s film is made up entirely of still photographs of a golden retriever and a plush toy dog, and is accompanied by Greenberg’s French-accented narration.
"I thought I would remake La Jetée, that classic French New Wave short film about the apocalypse and fate, except starring a stuffed animal," Greenberg explains, as if that’s a perfectly logical thing to do. "I shot it in a weekend and then every day I’d work on the script. At night I’d go back and edit it. After a year, I finished it and was going to throw it in a drawer, but then I sent it to the smallest film festival I could find. And it got in. I sent it to a few more festivals and it got in everywhere. It was this snowball kind of thing and had a really successful festival run."
The film has also run on the Independent Film Channel, PBS’s Independent Lens and WNET’s Reel New York. That Greenberg would make his mark with a short film and a spot featuring simple toys would come as something of a surprise to anyone who had followed his career up until now. He developed an interest in documentary films while attending Dartmouth, Hanover, N.H., and in the early ’90s edited some Bill Moyers films as an intern. After college, he traveled to Calcutta, India, where he made a short documentary.
Returning to New York, he became head of production at Soho New Media, where he produced Area 3, an arts and entertainment CD-ROM magazine, and taught himself to do 3-D computer animation.
"One of the animations I did won a contest by a software maker. That got the attention of the makers of the CD-ROM game ‘Myst,’ " recalls Greenberg. "This was the mid-’90s, and ‘Myst’ was the biggest thing ever. They called me out of the blue to hire me on the sequel, ‘Riven.’ They hired me as a CG artist and for my film work."
When that project was completed, Greenberg joined a friend to found Lume, a special effects software company in San Francisco. In ’98, they sold their software licenses and shut Lume down. Greenberg decided to go back to filmmaking. "I spent a few years writing feature scripts," he says. "I went back to work with my old boss on ‘Riven’ on this massive script idea that he and I had put together. It’s set in the 1720s, about a naturalist dying of consumption who goes down to the West Indies to study sperm whales and ends up stumbling upon this god of death. Monster of God is the working title. It’s an extremely serious, involved, heavy project. Only now are we finally finishing up."
It’s still somewhat amazing to Greenberg that it was La Puppé—not his video game work or his screenwriting—that brought him so much attention. "Funny has always been kind of easy for me." he says. "Stupidly, that’s probably why I didn’t do it for a long time. I realized later that people like it, and I had fun doing it."
He doesn’t claim to know much about the commercial world yet, admitting, "I’m a total outsider. I think that’s one of the advantages I want to hold onto as long as possible. I have that outsider’s advantage of not knowing what I’m not supposed to do.
"Before I got into this commercial stuff, I didn’t think I’d have much interest in it," he continues. "But it’s just been a blast. I’ve had a great time."
Jared Hess
It’s been one hell of a year for Jared Hess. The 25-year-old had his first feature film, Napoleon Dynamite, screened at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up by FOX Searchlight Pictures. Then he caught the attention of a number of commercial production companies and hit it off with the folks at bicoastal Moxie Pictures, who signed him. This led to him shooting commercials for A-list advertisers at budgets that approximated or exceeded the shooting budget for Napoleon Dynamite.
Speaking of the film, by early October, Napoleon Dynamite had grossed more than $35 million in the U.S. Hess shot the movie—which centers on an alienated teen who deals with his offbeat family and helps a friend run for class president—last year over three weeks in his hometown of Preston, Idaho, for $200,000. Music rights and postproduction boosted the final cost to about $400,000.
Hess is taking it all in stride. He’s currently working on another feature script at his home in Utah and he’s shot commercials for Nike, ESPN, Moviefone and Land Rover. His thoughts after a few months of shooting spots: "I really love it. It’s a great opportunity to experiment and work with a whole bunch of new people. I’ve gotten a lot of exposure to a lot of cool actors and people that I wouldn’t normally have exposure to. Any opportunity to tell a story and put it on film is really cool. Commercials have always been something that I’ve wanted to do—some of the most innovative kinds of ideas in filmmaking have stemmed from commercial work."
From age 14, Hess has been involved in film, spending summers as a camera assistant. "I ended up being a focus puller on commercials and features and all kinds of stuff," he recounts. "I finished high school in Idaho. I went to film school at Brigham Young University, [Salt Lake City]. I made the short film, Peluca, which played at Slamdance in 2003."
Peluca and Napoleon Dynamite, both co-written by Hess and his wife Jerusha, poke fun at the geeky personality of the protagonist, played in both films by Hess’ friend Jon Heder. Not surprisingly, much of his commercialwork so far is in a similar vein.
In "Winner Takes Steve" for Nike and agency Wexley School for Girls, Seattle, two teens named Steve are ordered by their high school gym teacher, who can’t deal with two guys having the same name, to race for the right to the name. In a foot race of mock seriousness, the geekier of the two comes from behind to win. The message: "You’re faster than you think."
Four ESPN spots, including "Submarine" and "Rooftop," also out of Wexley School for Girls, make up a campaign promoting the sports network’s fantasy football league management Web site. They spoof the movie genre in which old bands, sports teams and other organizations reunite to relive past glory. In this case, it’s fantasy football and the tagline is "I’m getting the league back together."
Land Rover, out of Young & Rubicam Brands, Irvine, Calif., relies on character-driven humor, which Hess says he enjoys. "A lot of people are contacting me based on the film and are looking for something similar," he says, without complaint. "That’s just how it is. But I’m excited to branch out and try different kinds of comedy. The stuff I’ve done so far is a little subtle, but a lot of fun."
Hess is currently writing, looking at storyboards, waiting for some commercial jobs to be awarded and taking meetings in Los Angeles on three feature projects in development. And that’s all just fine with him. "First and foremost, I’m a feature director," he says. "But at the same time, I really enjoy doing commercials. You can do such a variety of different things. I hope to continue to do commercials the rest of my career. It keeps things fresh and I love it."Z
