Asay landed his first job shooting a feature at the tender age of 23. The film was titled One Night’s Tan-yes, that was the actual title. "It was a cheesy comedy," Baca-Asay recalls, laughing. "I was actually fired the very first week of shooting. That was my auspicious start."
For a guy who got fired from his first real job, Baca-Asay, a native of Boulder, Colorado, and a New York University graduate, has certainly moved up in the world. In fact, he is steadily gaining a solid reputation in spotmaking and music videos, and his star is on the rise. You know your career is shifting into high gear when you have to say no to a job from a director you’d love to work with.
"Last week, I had to turn down a job with Stephane Sedanoui, who I think is exceptional. It was frustrating," Baca-Asay says. Sedanoui, who is with bicoastal/international Satellite, wanted Baca-Asay to shoot a Red Hot Chili Peppers video for him. (Baca-Asay’s music video credits include the New Radicals’ "You Get What You Give," directed by Evan Bernard of bicoastal X-Ray Productions).
Unfortunately, the timing just wasn’t right. Baca-Asay, who is repped by The Stacy Cheriff Agency in Los Angeles, was busy DPing a Miller Genuine Draft commercial with one of his frequent-and favorite-collaborators, director Mike Mills of The Directors Bureau, Hollywood.
Big Break
It was Mills who gave Baca-Asay his first major break in the commercial world. After DPing several low-budget films (The 2 Ninas and Dead Broke among them) and even lower-budget spots, Baca-Asay worked with Mills in January of ’98 on "Skinny Dipper,"a commercial for handbag-queen Kate Spade and the Counsel of Fashion Designers.
Created by Kate Spade’s in-house advertising team in New York, the spot centers on a woman who dares to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool. She is caught by the home’s owner and has the chance to grab either her Kate Spade bag, which is on one side of the pool, or her clothes, which are on the other. At the end of the spot, we see her standing at a bus stop clutching her bag and clad in the homeowner’s clothes.
Last summer, Mills and Baca-Asay collaborated again, this time on two spots for Nike-"Ledge" and "Demolition Derby"-out of Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore. "Ledge" opens with a suicidal man standing on the ledge of a high-rise building. He is stunned when a young lady clutching a snowboard joins him and plunges off the roof onto an airbag below. The second spot has Detroit Lions star Barry Sanders participating in a wild derby.
A spot Mills and Baca-Asay did last fall for adidas,"Take What You Want," created by 180 Communications, Amsterdam, features softly colored, slow-motion images of athletes in motion. The many and varied scenes include kids playing soccer, an elderly man finishing a marathon, kids shooting hoops, swimmers diving into a pool and children chasing each other with squirt guns.
The pair’s most recent job was Gap’s "Khaki A-Go-Go," which was created by the company’s in-house agency in San Francisco, and premiered during the Oscar telecast. The ad features a group of khaki-clad dancers performing a wild go-go dance against a white background.
Baca-Asay went from dancers to donuts when he teamed up with Phil Morrison of bicoastal Epoch Films last month to shoot a Krispy Kreme ad for New York’s Weiden & Kennedy aptly titled "Donut." Shot on location at a Krispy Kreme store in North Carolina, the soon-to-be-released spot depicts the making of the tasty treats. Working with Morrison, another director whose work Baca-Asay admires, was quite a treat in and of itself.
The cinematographer also recently worked on the feature Coming Soon, a romantic comedy directed by Colette Burson. Set at a Manhattan prep school, the film stars Yasmine Bleeth, Peter Bogdanovich, Kevin Corrigan, Mia Farrow, Spalding Gray and Ashton Kutcher, among others, and is slated for release this year.
For now, though, Baca-Asay is content to concentrate on spot work. "My commercial career is going so well," he says. And, of course, there are tempting perks keeping him in the spot business. On the Krispy Kreme job, for example, Baca-Asay got all the donuts he could eat. "Every now and then, I would eat one off the conveyer belt. But I tried to pace myself," he says. "I didn’t want to get sick of them because I love Krispy Kremes."s
