Making The "Journey" Worthwhile
By Christine Champagne
Even the best commercial directors have moments of doubt. Asked if he ever takes for granted that the top boards will keep coming his way, Andrew Douglas responded, “I still have those days where you go, ‘Oh Lord, am I going to get another job?’ I think the freelancers’ curse never quite goes away. I remember it from twenty years ago. You damage all of your relationships by never having holidays–you’re scared to go away because that job might come in, that job that puts you in this place or that place.”
While this fear doesn’t keep Douglas, who is represented by bicoastal/international Anonymous Content, lying awake at night, it does keep him from resting on his laurels.
If anything, Douglas continues to challenge himself to innovate with every spot he directs.
Take Canon EOS Rebel XSi Camera’s “Journey.” Highlighted as a SHOOT Top Spot earlier this year (6/6), the commercial out of Grey, New York uses still images to tell the story of a football play depicted through a range of scenarios, starting with the hike in a backyard game and ending with a professional player’s touchdown in a stadium. The spot is striking in how it manipulates the still images, stretching them across the screen to create a moving image.
It is no surprise that Douglas would be the director to find such a creative way to bring still images to life. He did begin his career as a still photographer in his native England, after all.
Douglas was among a pack of still photographers shooting “Journey.” He set up the various scenarios depicted in the spot, then got in a line with nine other photographers–everyone from DP Flor Collins to grips and gaffers was shooting–and snapped away as the action unfolded.
The director knew exactly how he was going to shoot the spot, but he confessed that he wasn’t quite clear on how he would put the stills together until he got further into the process. In fact, he couldn’t even say for sure what the spot was going to look like early on. And the agency and client were okay with that?
“I managed to get them to a place where there was no turning back,” he said with a laugh.
In general, though, Douglas is a meticulous planner with a clear idea of how a commercial will and should look once completed.
“Even at the treatment stage, I try to express the idea as clearly as possible so that the rest of the journey is pretty safe,” he shared, noting that more and more in today’s competitive market agencies “want the thing made before their eyes. Treatments are getting longer and longer. In the U.K., I just pitched for a job because I went home to see my folks, and while I was there, just by coincidence, a nice job came up, and I wrote a treatment,” Douglas said. “It was pretty good. I thought I had a good handle on the job, but I didn’t get it, not the least because my treatment [which was a page and a half long] was fifteen pages short.”
Douglas didn’t have to pitch an agency to make The Miracle of Phil. Douglas, who directed the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror was one of a five directors, including James Wan, David Slade and Marcus Nispel, deemed “masters of horror” and invited by Safran Digital Group, Los Angeles, to make comedy shorts that are being distributed on the Xbox LIVE platform. Douglas’ The Miracle of Phil, which premiered at Comic-Con in San Diego this summer, follows a man as he struggles through a pregnancy–his own pregnancy. Just to be clear–yes, the man is pregnant.
Douglas, who along with the other participants was given free reign, conceptualized the film, acknowledging that analysis of his psyche might reveal a Freudian desire for more children.
While The Miracle of Phil is weirdly funny, and Canon “Journey” is wonderfully artful, Douglas’ recent spot output also includes the visual effects tour de force “Tumble.”
Created by 180, Los Angeles, the commercial has a Sony HD camera falling off a mountain during a movie shoot and shattering to form laptops, digital cameras and other high-tech Sony products.
Additionally, Douglas recently directed back-to-back Toyota jobs out of Saatchi & Saatchi LA in Torrance, Calif., that really couldn’t be more different from each other. One spot for the Toyota Camry titled “Only One” is a rhythmic piece full of simple, straightforward imagery highlighting the features of the car.
“I tried to have no artfulness at all. I tried to not be ugly because that’s a different feat, but to be very factual,” he explained. “I tried to be as flat and mundane as possible because the idea was the celebration of the ordinary, so if you saw the artist’s hand, I felt that would diminish the idea.”
Douglas took a different approach when shooting a yet-to-be-released Toyota Tundra spot which is cut from the same spectacular real stunt cloth of his earlier Tundra spots such as “See-Saw,” “Ramp,” “Pulley” and “Wrecking Hammer.”
All of the stunts we see in these spots were done for real, Douglas stressed–even “Wrecking Hammer” in which a Tundra pickup tows a trailer loaded with more than 10,000 pounds while avoiding being slammed by two swinging pendulums carrying 9,000 pound I-beams.
Even with this high-profile vehicular fare, Douglas has hardly been pigeonholed as a car/truck guy.
Looking at his diverse body of commercial work, the director really hasn’t been pigeonholed at all, and he has worked hard to make sure that never happens.
“You really have to stay incredibly agile and be mindful of the market,” Douglas mused. “What I initially thought years ago [when he was directing with his brother Stuart as The Douglas Brothers] was, ‘Here’s what we do. We create a look, and then people will want us for that look.’
But I found that really didn’t work because once they’ve sucked you dry of that look, they move on.”
Douglas then observed: “People want you to be new all the time because if you’re not, they’ll use the 21-year-old. So I try and be that great combination of fresh and also a safe pair of hands.”
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