Meshing disciplines
By Christine Champagne
From a young age, Mathew Cullen, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, aspired to be a director. But he didn’t necessarily see himself falling into a rigid category like live-action director or animation director. Rather, he wanted to do, well, everything, so he covered all the bases when he attended Los Angeles’ Loyola Marymount University, studying design, animation and filmmaking.
It wasn’t long after he graduated that a then 23-year-old Cullen teamed with executive producer Javier Jimenez to launch Venice, Calif.-based creative studio Motion Theory in 2000 because nothing like it existed at that time, according to Cullen.
“There was your live-action director, there was your editorial house, there was your graphics house, your animation house, your visual effects company, your sound designer, your music house–[the business] was so segmented,” Cullen says.
“We believed that the idea of the unified experience was the way that the business was going because of how the idea and technique were merging,” Cullen continues. “That intersection was what I was most interested in, and the only way to find that intersection, or the best way to find that place where you’re able to combine idea and technique, to have that perfect alignment, that perfect intersection, was for us to build a studio from the ground up with that idea as its sole purpose.”
Via his shop, Cullen has made a name for himself as a spot and music video director who brings concepts to life in an intensely imaginative way, employing live action, visual effects and animation.
In the music video arena, his most recent work includes Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” clip, which depicts a surreal dance sequence at the scene of a car accident. Cullen is also known for the mind-bending “Girl” and “Dashboard” clips he has directed for Beck and Modest Mouse, respectively.
As for recent spot credits, Cullen and co-director Jesus de Francisco recently celebrated New York City in a fantastical commercial titled “The Ride” for New York agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty and its client the NYC & Company the official marketing and tourism agency for the City of New York.
Cullen immediately recognized that the spot would be challenging to pull off–even impossible, he says–when the brief came in to Motion Theory.
“The idea of embodying the spirit and history of New York City in just a mere sixty seconds–how do you do that?” he marvels even today, noting, “And it had to transcend language because it was going to be playing all over the world.”
Still, Cullen couldn’t resist trying, and, ultimately, he and de Francisco constructed an amazingly vibrant tribute to the Big Apple that mixes live-action and animation into a living, breathing tour of the city’s hot spots enjoyed by a family as they travel through the city by cab. In one of the commercial’s most engaging sequences, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” which is in the collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), turns into Central Park at night. “That painting just stops you in your tracks. It’s just so remarkable the way the brush strokes leap off the canvas,” Cullen says, “and it’s one of MoMA’s quintessential pieces, and because the spot was very much about finding the connections between things in New York, we loved this idea of turning it into Central Park.”
Cullen also recently embarked on another co-directed spot with de Francisco–Lexus’ “Perfectly Aligned” for Team One out of El Segundo, Calif. This spot, which depicts various items ranging from trees to rocks being plucked out of their natural environments and combined to form a classic Pebble Beach composition, required a more singular approach in terms of style and technique. Whereas the aforementioned New York City spot had a more whimsical, free-flowing feel, “Perfectly Aligned” had to be completely photographic and believable, so Cullen and de Francisco captured all of the elements in-camera, relying on motion control.
Cullen was on his own when he directed the original–as well as three subsequent spots–in the HP “Hands”-themed campaign out of San Francisco’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in 2006. Well, not really alone. The director is quick to stress that he collaborates with other artists ranging from visual effects supervisors to illustrators every day at Motion Theory. “As a director, you help lead a vision, you help lead the creation of something,” he says, “but you have to rely on the help of others.”
Cullen and his team at Motion Theory found a novel way to demonstrate how stars like Pharrell Williams use their HP notebooks, shooting the subjects from the neck down, then providing information via their voices and visually descriptive animation that flows from their hands.
The spots are inventive in their execution, but a great idea is at the heart of this campaign, Cullen stresses. “I say, ‘Ideas first,’ because without a great idea, you have nothing. Even if you have an incredible execution, it just dies,” Cullen says. “No one remembers it, no one references it, and it doesn’t reach that greater place, and it definitely doesn’t inspire or live on.”
The work that Cullen did on the HP “Hands” campaign will certainly live on. A quick search of YouTube.com reveals numerous take-offs of the spots. “I enjoyed the process of making those commercials, but what I loved more than anything was seeing the process of what happened afterward [with the knockoffs on YouTube],” Cullen says. “I think when something has an opportunity to live forever like that, that’s the ultimate compliment.”
More recently, David Letterman parodied the aforementioned NYC & Company “The Ride” spot on CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman, showing the seamier side of the Big Apple, and, again, Cullen was delighted.
Of course, these tributes and spoofs–while clever–don’t quite measure up to Cullen’s work in terms of creative and technical excellence. Cullen and his team are always experimenting to come up with new ways of achieving effects and oftentimes create proprietary software or develop new ways of shooting in-camera effects. In the case of “The Ride” spot, Motion Theory had to come up with software to emulate the brush strokes of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” To achieve the effect of a golf club being swung in slow motion in a Nike Golf spot promoting the brand’s Sumo clubs titled “Innovation” out of Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., Motion Theory built a custom robotic arm that matched the swing and pivot points of a real golf club swing.
Not surprisingly, Cullen notes that oftentimes advertising agencies will come to him early on in the creative process, seeking a partner in the development of a commercial.
“If an agency comes to me, they want to have a new experience. They are looking for the thing that hasn’t been seen before, so if I’m known as a director that’s able to give them something that they didn’t expect, and they haven’t seen before, that’s the greatest place you can be in,” Cullen says, noting, “When I co-founded this company eight years ago, that was the exact thing I wanted.”
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