Chuck McBride, executive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, can’t help chuckling when describing a pair of ads he directed for the first annual Winter Gravity Games. As for Timothy Harman, executive producer on the spots, he thinks the campaign "will be one of those timeless pieces on my reel."
The droll ads appeal to the inner child in all of us and capture what could be called the innocent yet devilish destructiveness of youth—that tendency kids have to, say, take the goldfish out of the tank to see what happens. Appropriately, the kids in the Gravity Games ads are curious about the force of gravity.
The first ad, "Rooftop," shows a boy who comes across an abandoned doll. He takes the toy and enters an apartment building. Climbing to the building’s roof, he chucks the doll for the sheer pleasure of watching it hit the ground.
In "Rocket," another boy finds the doll where it landed, and we see him carrying it across a playground. A group of kids playing basketball notice the doll, and taunt the boy for his girlish ways. But the boy ignores them and continues until he finds a grassy area nearby. As he sets the doll on the ground, we see that it has been affixed to a rocket device, which the boy ignites. The doll shoots into the air and is a big hit with the other kids, who rush over to congratulate the boy.
NBC, which broadcast the Gravity Games in February, declined to air "Rooftop" due to its potentially controversial content. Said Harman: "We knew that was going to be a tough one. Hopefully it will have a life on the Internet."
Harman is currently freelance producing for McBride at TBWA/Chiat/Day. He brought the Gravity Games project to McBride and the agency back when he was broadband developer at Kick Media, Venice, Calif., and executive producer of the company’s production arm, ZeroYear. Kick Media is a network of Web sites based on established youth-oriented offline media brands such as Teen magazine. ZeroYear produced the Gravity Games ad campaign as well as multimedia content for GravityGames.com, one of Kick Media’s sites.
The ads were shot on location in Los Angeles by feature DP Chris Walling, whose relationship with both McBride and Harman has considerable chronology. They have been friends since their college days; McBride and Walling have known each other from high school. The threesome previously teamed up for a campaign for the Indie Racing League (IRL), which McBride directed via bicoastal/international @radical.media. At the time, McBride was a creative director at Portland, Ore.-based Wieden + Kennedy; one of his last spots there being Nike’s lauded "Morning After" directed by Spike Jonze of bicoastal/international Satellite (SHOOT "Top Spot," 11/26/99, p. 8). McBride was creative director/copywriter on the commercial. He then joined TBWA/ Chiat/Day six months ago.
McBride said he helmed the Gravity Games’ projects out of "necessity"—meaning the budgets would have been wiped out by a director’s fee. "I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like directing," he said, adding, however, that he has no immediate plans to launch a directorial career. "You get to see the thing through [from conception to completion]. But I’m also aware that good scripts are few and far between. [As an agency creative], I have the luxury of being in the business that develops the good scripts, and I’m lucky. Directing is an opportunity I can take advantage of if the situation arises."
The Gravity Games is an alternative sports event that consists of snowboarding, freeskiing and freestyle snowmobiling contests. It was held at Mammoth Mountain in Mammoth Lakes, Calif.
The original plan for the Gravity Games was to shoot sequences of extreme sports activities. However, budgetary and time constraints precluded that. "We realized things on a mountain wouldn’t move very fast," McBride said. The new concept evolved at one in the morning. "We were in Tim’s living room trying to do a shot list but it wasn’t working," McBride said. "We decided we had to do something as simple as throwing a doll at the side of the building. Then we chuckled over that. You know, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that’s what the Gravity Games were?’ Then we decided that it would be equally funny if there was a rocket attached to the doll.
"I think we did ourselves a big favor by going outside of the norm," he continued. "The campaign is different, but it still connects back to the truth of why people jump in the air and fly down mountains."
The ads were shot from eye-level height or above. "I wanted to make it look like the viewer is looking down, like a parent would on kids," McBride said. He is proud of that unconventional method. "I’ve had so many discussions about little things like this, but in most cases we revert to the known format. This was fun because it was a very particular idea."
Also noteworthy about the spots are their visual quality. "We think it’s the prettiest thing Chris has shot," Harman said. "We got beautiful film." Some of the color was drained from the film in the telecine process, which served to heighten contrasts.
In the end, the opportunity to collaborate with friends was most rewarding. "It’s always fun to go off to these events, and sometimes you’re in stunningly beautiful places," McBride said. "It’s one thing to be there with people you just met. But it’s also fun to be with people you’ve known since you were a kid. It has its own set of giggles."
