For a director who quips that he has spent some 80 percent of his time over the past five years working on feature film projects that haven’t happened yet, Frank Budgen has managed to accomplish quite a bit, particularly in the commercialmaking sector. For eight of the past nine years, he has placed in the upper echelon of most awarded directors per the annual Gunn Report. And to kick off 2008, he added another honor to his resumé, his first career nomination for a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award as best commercial director of the year (’07).
Budgen earned the DGA nomination on the strength of two commercials: Sony Bravia Television’s “Playdoh” out of Fallon, London; and Live Earth’s “S.O.S., Save Our Selves” for Young & Rubicam, Chicago. The former was produced by Budgen’s longstanding U.K. home, Gorgeous Enterprises in London. The latter was produced by Gorgeous and bicoastal Anonymous Content, which continues to handle the stateside market for Budgen and several of his Gorgeous directorial colleagues.
Gratified by the DGA recognition, Budgen himself didn’t even realize his work was entered into the competition until he was informed of that fact by Gorgeous executive producer Paul Rothwell, who submitted the two Budgen-directed spots.
Noting that he directs less than a handful of commercials each year, Budgen–who recently took up residence in Los Angeles–imagines it wasn’t too painstaking a process to figure out what spots to submit to DGA Award judges for consideration. Still, he reflected on what appealed to him about the two commercials to begin with.
“Every few years there’s a client who does one big commercial a year and that work is eagerly anticipated from one year to the next,” he observes. “In the past, it’s been a Stella Artois or Guinness. But in recent years, it’s been Sony [Bravia] from Fallon. I had passed on some of the previous Sony work, which perhaps wasn’t too smart. But I very much liked this spot [in which assorted colorful Playdoh bunnies invade the streets of New York, eventually helping to form one giant bunny which breaks up into a cavalcade of colorful Playdoh TV sets strewn about the city]. It was a chance to combine live action and animation, which held an extra interest for me in that the feature I’m planning is also a mix of the two.
“It was logistically as tough a project as I’ve ever done,” Budgen continues. “It was old fashioned stop frame animation, with my work for it done not with a cine camera but in stills. The sheer scale of the project was huge, flying in animators from England and Canada, and using ones we could get in America. Achieving consistency of lighting in the streets of New York was an ongoing challenge, with sunlight coming out from behind one building and disappearing behind another.”
As for the Live Earth promo, Budgen was drawn to the cause itself, of being able to help to raise awareness about global warming. “The original idea was famous talking heads–celebrities, scientists, athletes,” he recalls. “It was a hit list of well-known names. But the hit list turned out to be more of a wish list that didn’t materialize, In the end, though, that wound up working, I think, to our advantage, using ordinary people doing stuff and creating from their actions on stage a song from the Morse Code of S.O.S. [dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot].”
Sundance
As for that alluded to perennial feature project in development, there are signs that progress is being made on Budgen’s planned undertaking of Shockheaded Peter. He describes the film as “a cautionary tale for parents,” spawned by the well known European rhymes about naughty children being punished in accordance with their crimes. These rhymes, authored by a German doctor who couldn’t find any interesting books for his kids, became classics but are frowned upon today by some who regard the work as politically incorrect. The rhymes spawned a popular London musical, with Budgen continuing to work on the script which calls for deploying an artful mesh of live action and animation.
The sign of headway being made is the interest the project has started to elicit, most notably in the form of Budgen being invited to bring his script to the Sundance Institute’s January Screenwriters Lab, headed by a who’s who of independent writers, including artistic director Scott Frank, Paul Attanasio, Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and Doug Wright.
Budgen’s was one of 13 scripts selected from a field of some 3,000 applications for inclusion in the Sundance Lab, which was held from January 11-16 at the Sundance Resort in Park City, Utah.
“It was a great week where screenwriters talk to you about what you’re working on,” relates Budgen. “You don’t write when you’re there. You just benefit from different informed perspectives from established writers. The writing starts after you’ve left and that’s what I’m doing now.” Noting that the Lab feedback he received was valuable, Budgen says he still has to find his own way. “I went through a stage after the Sundance Lab of trying to incorporate or listen to too many voices. Now I’m trying to find my own voice for the project.”
