A change of living space as reflected in Audi spot, new commercialmaking roost
By Millie Takaki
A year ago Jason Smith moved from London to L.A., underscoring his stepped up commitment to the American ad market. He has since placed two punctuation marks on that commitment, recently helming via Bob Industries, his home of the past nine years, the tour de force Audi A4 “Living Room” spot out of Venables, Bell & Partners, San Francisco–and then leaving Bob, a company he co-founded, to join bicoastal/international HSI Productions for worldwide representation. The latter move also ends Smith’s U.K. representation via Home Corp. in London.
The visually ground-breaking Audi commercial moves us through a living room that elegantly modernizes before our eyes in a single camera move, eventually revealing the new Audi A4 in the driveway, dovetailing with the “Progress is beautiful” slogan.
“The spot entailed a motion control move with two separate sets that we built, a combination of in-camera effects, animation and CG from [Santa Monica VFX studio] Method. It was a highly complex camera move achieved in one shot, which is unlike anything done before,” related Smith. “That was the prime appeal for me–to collaborate and problem solve in order to do something that hadn’t been done previously.”
“Living Room,” which earned the number two slot in SHOOT’s quarterly Visual Effects and Animation Top Ten Chart earlier this month (10/10), continues a string of Smith-directed work for San Francisco agencies. Among the other Bay Area ad shops with which Smith has recently collaborated are Heat on a shoot for EA, and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners on Sprint’s “People Mover.”
As for coming aboard HSI, Smith related that he felt the need for a change after nine years at Bob. Though he described departing Bob as “a difficult decision,” he was drawn to HSI’s reputation and the opportunity to consolidate his stateside and international activity under the aegis of one house.
Clip catalyst Dating back to his days at the now defunct Propaganda Films, Smith developed a reputation as a visual storyteller. While that still very much applies today as evidenced by “Living Room,” he has since extended his directorial reach into actor performance-driven narrative work.
Key in helping him diversify further into that arena was a music video, “Late At Night,” for the band Electronic. The clip centered on a group of thugs wreaking havoc in London.
“It was one of the darkest pieces of work that I had done to that date,” recalled Smith. “But agencies saw it and came to me with storytelling campaigns, including work for Coke and Sony PlayStation.”
The latter, “Getaway 2” out of TBWALondon, was an ironic, dark spot which depicts a London tourism film that goes very wrong to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Well received in Europe, the spot performed well on the industry awards show circuit, including gaining recognition at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
Smith’s actor-driven storytelling acumen is also reflected in such spots as the humorous “Buzzer” for Kia out of Deutsch LA, in which people from different walks of life are pretending they’re basketball players, throwing objects into various make-shift or imagined “baskets” to beat the game-ending buzzer as they go through their otherwise mundane daily routines. The spot promotes automotive company Kia Motors’ sponsorship of the National Basketball Association.
Among Smith’s other notable U.S. ad credits over the years are a Major League Baseball campaign out of Lowe, New York, a visually innovative Mitsubishi Endeavor commercial, “Street Level” (a live-action/effects combo accomplishment akin to the earlier cited Living Room” for Audi–both entailed his collaborating with VFX house Method) via Deutsch LA, which earned SHOOT “Top Spot” distinction, and Nike’s “Covert Texas” for Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
The latter, which received an Association of Independent Commerical Producers (AICP) Show honor, opens with Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong biking on a panoramic, mountain road. As he pedals along, a cargo truck approaches from behind and, honking wildly, tries to pass. Annoyed by one another’s presence, the trucker and the biker begin a game of who can pass whom–much in the tradition of the film Duel, the ’71 made-for-television movie that was helmed by Steven Spielberg in which a man in an automobile is being stalked by the driver of a big rig truck.
At one point, when Armstrong is riding alongside the truck, it crowds him off the lane. Armstrong then races back up to the truck, bumps it with his arm–the one wearing the Nike watch–and sends the multi-ton vehicle over the side of the cliff, where it explodes. The commercial ends with a shot of Armstrong’s Nike XTR Covert watch–which survived the battle unscathed.
Though Smith hasn’t helmed a music video in some time, he would now like to rekindle that flame for select ambitious projects and reasoned that HSI could facilitate that wish. Smith said he continues to be drawn to the narrative prospects that certain music video concepts carry.
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