Baby/Dance Steps Into The Viral World
By Robert Goldrich
In several respects, Evian’s “Skating Babies,” the viral sensation out of BETC Euro RSCG, Paris, is the perfect mix reflecting the career progression of its director, Michael Gracey. For one, the spot brings together Gracey’s penchant for live action with his expertise in the digital world.
“The job drew on both sides that I love–shooting live action with 140 babies on set, and puppeteering them and reworking animation to their body motions, doing motion capture at Pinewood with dancers on roller skates,” related Gracey whose spotmaking home is Partizan.
The spot also exemplifies the viral and media dynamics that have propelled Gracey’s work into mainstream popular culture. “Skating Babies” played on air in France and Argentina, and another select European market or two. But its reach has been worldwide, with millions of views coming online. Plus the charming piece gained exposure on morning TV shows and newscasts all over the map.
“I was told the spot played on six morning shows in the States alone, representing a cumulative viewership of 140 million people–and the client didn’t pay for any airtime,” noted Gracey. “What I love about this is that while it seems new on one hand, in another way it almost goes back to the so-called Golden Age of advertising where creativity ruled. No one is going to pass on to friends a commercial that he or she doesn’t enjoy. Creative has to be so good that you pass it on. You may know it’s an ad but you pass it on because you can’t help yourself, you want to share it, to be the first to show it to your friends and family.”
Similarly the lauded T-Mobile “Dance” commercial, which Gracey directed for Saatchi & Saatchi London, was broadcast but once in the U.K. in its original three-minute form.
Within 24 hours, the spot–in both its full as well as cut-down versions–spread like wildfire as people shared and blogged about the amazing spectacle of masses of people at a London train station breaking into joyful, seemingly synchronized dance.
Gracey noted that he had 300 dancers at the Liverpool station and he gave them some simple direction. “I told the dancers what they were doing was not about performance,” recalled the director. “It’s about standing in a crowd and looking for the guy who’s smiling or the gal who’s tapping her foot or bobbing her head. Don’t go for a guy who’s running to catch a train or for a person who’s otherwise occupied. With this approach, our 300 dancers offered their hand to someone they had been observing and asked, ‘Would you waltz with me.’ From that moment we had 600 people dancing. I’m so grateful to the general public for their participation because you’re at their mercy as to whether or not the spot will work.”
The dancing tour de force caught the eye of the producers of The Oprah Winfrey Show who sought out Gracey to pull off a surprise for Winfrey on the occasion of the launch of the talk show’s 24th season. The show featured an opening performance of “I Gotta Feeling” from the Black Eyed Peas with crowds gathered along a large blocks-long Chicago street corridor to catch an eye and earful.
Gracey wound up directing and orchestrating the turnout of some 21,000 seemingly passive spectators breaking out into a synchronized dance routine–much to the surprise and amazement of Winfrey. Gracey planted around 800 dancers throughout the gathering to help pull the stunt off and get others to dance, making for an Oprah kick-off party that became all the buzz. The director gives major credit to his long-time collaborator, choreographer Ashley Wallen.
Wallen represents an axiom that has served Gracey in very good stead over the years: “Surround yourself with talented people.”
“I’ve been fortunate to have the support and collaboration of gifted people–from advertising agencies, production houses, assorted artists,” said Gracey. This dates back to his very beginnings in the business, starting with his family and subsequent mentors. For example, his dad was a photographer who saw early on the potential of the computer.
“My father was quite a visionary,” said Gracey. “I remember him pointing to an early model IBM computer and telling me that it was the future of visualization and image making. I looked at the green text against a black screen and being a smart-ass teenager replied, ‘Sure, if everyone wants to make green pictures.’
“But the fact is that my father saw the future while I was just looking at what was in front of my face. Usually it’s the other way around with the younger generation being more attuned to the potential of things.”
Via a Melbourne-based company, Gracey’s dad developed Flash, one of the first incarnations of what would become Flame. “The term digital compositing hadn’t even been invented yet,” said Gracey, “but here I was with a world of high-end visuals opened up to me at an early age.”
Later the young Gracey went from animating to becoming a compositor, working on what was then Australia’s only Flame.
“I learned from Peter Webb who is the godfather of digital compositing and a leading artist to this day–he wrote the first manual for the Flame and became my mentor. He introduced me to artists like [filmmaker] Baz Luhrmann. Peter had just come off serving as visual effects supervisor on Baz’s Romeo and Juliet. I was doing animation and compositing but with a theatrical bent and Baz liked it. As a result I became part of his creative circle, meeting his editor Jil Bilcock who edited Romeo and Juliet, and later Moulin Rouge. She wound up cutting the first live-action music video I directed. To step into directing with an amazing crew of talented people like Peter and Jil was incredibly good fortune for me.”
The clip for U.K. act the Suga Babes made a splash, eliciting interest from Partizan which resulted in his joining the shop as a director. More clips then spawned a diversification into commercials for Gracey in the U.K.
To this day, Gracey estimates that about 70 percent of his spotwork is for the U.K. and France–but with the aforementioned viral dynamic, his reach has extended globally. And now stateside assignments are picking up. At press time, Gracey was in the midst of the Christmas campaign for The Gap out of Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
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