Creative Director
BSSP
What’s the most relevant business and/or creative lesson you learned in 2023 and how will you apply it to 2024?
Small budgets don’t have to mean bad creative. We did so much this year with challenging budgets—made really great pieces that weren’t just highly creative, but incredibly impactful. We won a few creative effectiveness awards which arguably mean the most to our clients and did it without breaking the bank. More of that in 2024, please.
While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for 2024?
I’m a firm believer that in 2024 we will see even more influencer content and brand integration explode. Brands are finding new/clever ways to have influencers plug their products and people are quite literally buying it.
Are you involved in virtual production or experimenting with AI, AR or other emerging disciplines or new technologies? Have you engaged in any real-world projects on these fronts? If so, relative to experimental and/or actual projects, briefly tell us about the work and what you’ve taken away from the experience. If the work is complete and you’d like to share a link to it, please include.
All the time. Experimenting with ChatGPT for writing assignments has been an interesting approach for me personally. I love to just plug things in and see what I can get out of it. Maybe I use some of it, maybe I don’t. It’s nice to play around with the technology. Also Midjourney. Our teams use this quite often for comping and design. We’re just wrapping a pitch where one of the visual directions was a direct Midjourney output. I am utterly amazed by it.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More