Coming out of the shed
By Christine Champagne
Brian Beletic recently wrapped a major Nike “Just Do It”-themed commercial for Wieden + Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., featuring many of the company’s all-star roster of athletes, and while he has done Nike jobs before, this one was particularly rewarding because it marked the director’s return to spots after he spent nearly a year cloistered in a Hollywood studio working on–or, more accurately, eating, sleeping and breathing–HoneyShed.
As you have likely heard, HoneyShed is an online home shopping network for young adults billed as MTV meets QVC and hailed as the next big thing in branded entertainment in some quarters. Produced by New York’s Droga5, bicoastal Smuggler, which represents Beletic for commercials and music videos, and global Publicis Groupe, the HoneyShed.com that you currently see is a Beta version–after a few delays, the official version of the site is now slated to launch in May, according to Beletic.
Beletic serves as HoneyShed’s creative director, and in that role has overseen the brand’s development and the formation of HoneyShed’s production studio–a “living organism” is Beletic’s description of it–carved out of what was once a Hollywood prop warehouse. Beletic says it’s a sweet set-up with half-a-dozen stages, permanent set pieces and props, a wardrobe closet and an in-house post facility. The HoneyShed crew includes a full-time writing staff and assistant director.
In addition to functioning as creative director of HoneyShed, Beletic has also directed much of the HoneyShed fare, which consists of product segments and promos as you can see on the site. In fact, the director reports, he shot 370 product segments and over 100 promos in a five-month period.
The schedule has been grueling–Beletic says he didn’t have a day off for four or five months straight while working on the project. The time and energy invested has been worth it, he says, because HoneyShed has proven to be a fun and creatively fulfilling endeavor. “It’s been really exciting to go to the same place every day and create something new every day,” Beletic enthuses. “It reminds me of what MTV may have been like in its early days.”
While Beletic wasn’t at MTV in its embryonic days, the Dallas native did get a chance to soak up the atmosphere when he worked at the network in the late 1990s after he graduated from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Beletic was charged with the task of churning out promos at MTV, which was good training for his role not only as a spot and music video director–he initially signed with now-defunct Satellite in 1999 before joining the Smuggler roster–but as creative director at content-hungry HoneyShed.
Product segments are HoneyShed’s bread and butter and are funneled into channels like Beauty, Tech and Toys and Kicks & Lids. A sampling of product segments seen during a recent visit includes one in the Kicks & Lids channel that has a guy and a girl dressed in Day-Glo colors showing off guacamole green Creative Recreation Cesario Lo sneakers; Will.I.Am from Black Eyed Peas plays a Roland-VP550 keyboard and talks up its features in a segment on the Tech and Toys channel; and two girls dressed in safari gear put Anne Marie Borlind mascara on a gum-chomping dude in a Beauty segment, and after assuring the guy how amazing he looks, they highlight the fact that the mascara is all-natural and non-clumping.
Playful, light-hearted and sometimes goofy, the content on HoneyShed is a departure from the moving and epic fare Beletic is known for as a spot director. His reel includes assorted notable commercials, including Brand Jordan’s “Second Generation” out of W+K, New York, which finds young male and female athletes re-creating classic moments from basketball great Michael Jordan’s career (SHOOT’s Top Spot of the Week, 3/3/2006).
After a long immersion in the wacky world of HoneyShed, Beletic is looking forward to getting back into commercials as well as music videos. The director, whose credits include clips for Fatboy Slim, Cee Lo and Basement Jaxx, hasn’t helmed a music video since Lady Sovereign’s “Love Me or Hate Me” in ’06.
But will he really have the time to direct spots and music videos in 2008, or is he tethered to the hive? “We’ve built HoneyShed so I don’t have to be there every day,” Beletic says. “We have a writing team, and a lot of our investment has been in people who have grown up with HoneyShed, and they can run the show. I’m always going to be involved in overseeing the brand and the entertainment in broad strokes, but we don’t want this to be the type of thing where I have to be there every day.
“I came out to L.A. to build the studio and build the brand, and that’s been built,” Beletic continues. “So it’s a natural time for me to be able to return to other things that I love.”
One has to ask if HoneyShed’s seemingly insatiable need for content might provide opportunities for other commercial directors. It’s a good question, Beletic remarks, before answering, “Commercial directors are paid well for their time, and this type of business can’t afford to pay commercial directors the way that they deserve to be paid. So I wouldn’t say it’s a new medium for commercial directors. Instead, I would say that it requires a unique type of personality to be attracted to this.”
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More