Creating his own "Picturetown"
By Christine Champagne
Last year, director/DP Samuel Bayer rejoined bicoastal HSI Productions, a company he had spent a decade with before departing for a three-year stint with bicoastal RSA USA.
Why the return to his roots? “That’s the place I started making commercials, and we know each other,” Bayer reflects, adding with a laugh, “Honestly, it’s like a dysfunctional family. We know each other’s dirty laundry, and we love and hate each other at the same time. But, most importantly, they knew the direction that I wanted to go in advertising and what I was excited about doing.”
As always, Bayer is looking for work on which he can put his visual stamp–known for his gorgeous film and high production values, the director continues to DP all of his own jobs. But Bayer is also out to shoot spots that resonate with emotion.
Among the highlights from Bayer’s latest commercial reel is the :60 “Picturetown,” a spot that ran on both TV and in movie theaters as part of the Picturetown campaign New York’s McCann-Erickson reated to prove that even amateur photographers can take amazing pictures with the Nikon D40 DLSR.
At the outset of the commercial, we see the 200 residents of Georgetown, South Carolina–which happens to be “an hour from where my 75-year-old father lives,” Bayer notes–surprised and thrilled to receive the gift of Nikon D40s.
After capturing the giveaway on film, Bayer and his crew spent a week following the shutterbugs around town. You see the joy the townsfolk experience as they use the camera to snap photos of everything from local firemen to a duck. “It’s been on my neck since I’ve gotten it,” one smiling girl says of her new camera.
As the week comes to an end, Bayer films the townspeople as they enter an exhibit of their work. “That’s my picture!” one woman exclaims.
“It’s amazing the stories we heard,” Bayer says, noting, “Believe it or not, these cameras changed people’s lives.”
What could have come off as a manipulative stunt comes off as a rather moving social experiment. “I think that this is a commercial that could have easily fallen on its face if it didn’t feel sincere,” Bayer acknowledges. “I think heart is a really important word, and when you’re dealing with advertising and commerce, it’s very easy to come across as insincere. But I think this Nikon spot is very sincere.”
While the Nikon spot has a very intimate, up close and personal feel, the “Beach Ball” spot Bayer directed for Pepsi last year through BBDO New York “is as big as I can possibly go,” Bayer remarks.
The spot finds people propelling a gigantic beach ball–emblazoned with the Pepsi logo, of course–all over the world.
Logistically, it was a complex job–Bayer and his crew spent three weeks traveling to locations including Rio, London and New York City with a giant, 30-foot inflatable blue ball “that never worked,” according to Bayer. “We could never inflate it, then finally on the last day of photography we inflated it in Rio, and it floated away,” he says laughing. “I don’t know if I can put quite into words the feeling of watching a 30-foot blue balloon floating away and having to call the South American equivalent of the FAA to tell them that there is a giant blue ball floating through their airspace.”
Thankfully, the ball wasn’t 100 percent necessary–the artisans at New York visual effects shop Mass Market were still able to digitally create the convincing beach ball seen in the spot without the real ball intended for reference purposes.
As for other spot work, in the last few months Bayer has shot commercials for Miller Lite out of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), New York; Mercedes-Benz through Merkley + Partners; and Converse via Anomaly, New York. “The last three months in advertising have been more exciting for me than maybe the last ten years,” the director enthuses.
While the Miller and Mercedes-Benz work had yet to break as of press time, the spot for Converse broke on Oct. 17. In Bayer’s estimation it is just as good as the groundbreaking Nike “I Just Want to Play” spot he directed a decade ago for Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Powerful in its utter simplicity, the commercial finds Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade entering an empty stadium, confidently striding up to the announcer’s booth and making his presence known by shouting his name into the mic.
“We tried to do something anthem-like and bigger but in some ways stripped of artifice. It’s all about performance and delivery,” Bayer says. “We wanted to give you chills.”
What goes around
In addition to working in commercials, Bayer continues to rank as one of the world’s top music video directors. In fact, 15 years after he first rose to acclaim with the clip for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Bayer’s work for artists ranging from Green Day to My Chemical Romance still feels fresh and relevant.
Honored multiple times over the years for his music video work, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Music Video Production Association last year, Bayer most recently won Best Director at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards for Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around–Comes Around.”
The video, which stars Scarlett Johansson as Timberlake’s paramour, portrays a romance gone so wrong it ends with a violent car wreck. Bayer says he envisioned the car crash as a metaphor for a ruined relationship.
With a budget of more than $1 million to spend making “What Goes Around–Comes Around,” Bayer was able to bring to life a rather lavish and surreal fantasy that is set in current times but has a 1920s flair.
Bayer says the look of various elements in the video–including Johansson’s cabaret-style get up and makeup–was inspired by an exhibit called “Glitter and Doom” that he saw at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It was all paintings and drawings from pre-World War II Germany and has this decadent cabaret feeling to it,” Bayer recalls. “I was really influenced by that.”
It was old black-and-white footage of John Lennon from the 1960s that influenced the look of the “Working Class Hero” video Bayer recently shot for Green Day. The song is one of the all-star Lennon covers featured on an album entitled Instant Karma: The Campaign to Save Darfur, which is being sold to raise money for Amnesty International’s campaign to stop the genocide in Darfur.
In addition to performance video of Green Day that feels like it was pulled out of the vault, the video has Darfur refugees sharing tales of the horrors they were lucky to survive. Bayer is proud of the clip but insists it could very well be his last. “I think my time in music videos is over,” he muses.
Of course, Bayer famously pronounced the end of his music video career in SHOOT just a few years back only to be lured back into the arena to shoot the affecting clip for Good Charlotte’s anti-suicide anthem “Hold On.”
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Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More