Director Steve “Spaz” Williams and executive producer Clint Goldman have extended the reach of their San Francisco-based hoytyboy pictures into commercial production. The move marks their return to spotmaking after three-and-a-half years on The Wild, a computer-animated, comedy/adventure feature for Walt Disney Pictures. The Wild represents Williams’ feature directing debut. Via hoytyboy, Goldman produced the film, which premiered last month in theaters nationwide.
Williams and Goldman have teamed on assorted theatrical motion pictures and TV commercials. For example, in the latter discipline, they collaborated on the CG character animation campaign for Blockbuster starring Carl the rabbit and Ray the guinea pig. That work–out of Doner, Southfield, Mich.–gained considerable industry recognition, including a computer animation Gold Clio in 2002. Williams directed the spots while Goldman served as its executive producer/producer for production house Complete Pandemonium, which has since closed. The animation studio on Blockbuster was Tippett Studios, Berkeley, Calif.
The Blockbuster campaign, in which animal characters were imbued with human personalities, proved to be a catalyst helping to land the anthropomorphic feature assignment, The Wild, for Williams and Goldman. The movie centers on an assortment of animals from the New York Zoo who discover what a jungle the city can be when one of their own is mistakenly shipped to the wild. They embark on a dangerous mission to rescue their lost compatriot. C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, Toronto, was the animation studio on The Wild, with the film’s initial two-and-a-half minute sequence animated by Reel FX, Dallas.
Williams said that he “learned a lot” from The Wild experience, noting that sustaining plot over an hour-and-a-half movie further honed his prowess in storytelling, enabling him to now bring that ability back to his spot directing endeavors.
SPOTS Other ad fare turned out by director Williams and exec producer/producer Goldman over the years includes commercials for such clients as McDonald’s, Cheetos, Capital One, EA Sports, video game Sub Rebellion and Budweiser. The international Bud spot, “Underground,” was tied into soccer’s ’02 World Cup and depicted the power of trickle–drips of beer from a Bud bottle seep deep into the ground, providing the libation for a subterranean sports bar catering to ants.
On the long-form front, Williams and Goldman paired on such features as Spawn and The Mask. For the latter in ’94, Goldman was animation and visual effects producer while Williams was the film’s visual effects supervisor, via Industrial Light +Magic (ILM). Goldman left ILM in ’96 to produce Spawn for New Line Cinema. Williams was second unit director/visual effects supervisor on Spawn.
Upon graduating from the Disney animation program at Sheridan College in Toronto, Williams worked as an animator on comedic cartoons. He then joined Alias Research, which at the time was just getting its feet wet in character animation. Williams’ ability to create characters while also understanding computers caught the attention of ILM, which had just begun to set up animation workstations. It was the late 1980s and Williams became the first animator at the company animating solely on a computer. Feature credits followed, including Williams serving as animation supervisor on Terminator 2, and a chief animator on Jurassic Park and The Abyss. Perhaps his most significant work at ILM came on The Mask, regarded as a benchmark film for its augmentation of live action with animation. Williams also provided his expertise to the re-release of George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy.
Goldman spent three years in the 1980s as a production manager and later producer at the pioneering studio Robert Abel & Associates. In ’89, Goldman started his tenure at ILM which lasted ’til ’96. He produced effects and the alien abduction scene for Fire in the Sky in ’93. Between ’84 and ’02, Goldman produced more than 300 commercials, working with such directors as Steve Beck, Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Adrian Lyne, Ken Ralston, Tony and Ridley Scott, and the now late Bob Abel and Michael Ritchie. Goldman also was producer on the Grammy-nominated Herbie Hancock music video “Dis is Da Dream in” ’95.
Goldman has started to assemble a spot sales team for hoytyboy, lining up independent reps Perry Schaffer and Corey Rogers of SchafferRogers on the East Coast, and Liz Laine and Katy Richter of Liz Laine Reps to handle the Midwest. At press time, Goldman was seeking representation for hoytyboy on the West Coast.
