Breaking out with its own stateside shop
By Robert Goldrich
Let’s clear one thing up about ACNE–the acronym stands for “Ambition to Create Novel Expressions.”
With that mantra serving as its moniker, the Swedish creative collective was established in 1996 and has lived up to its billing. The initial idea was to act in many arenas, working as consultants as well as launching their own projects and initiatives. Today the collective encompasses film and interactive production, fashion, graphic design, character development and magazines.
Recently there have been several new wrinkles for the Stockholm-based ACNE, perhaps most notably the launch of its own creative production shop stateside. The collective had been handled by the venerable RSA in the U.S. since 2001, enjoying a successful run. However, said Tomas Skoging, one of the four original founding members of the ACNE brand, the time felt right for the collective to branch out on its own in the American market.
Serving as a partial catalyst for this independence was ACNE’s interactive division in Stockholm, which handles all aspects of web production. Skoging noted that stateside clients began asking for that web expertise to be brought to bear in tandem with ACNE’s spot filmmaking prowess. Thus rather than be under the umbrella of another company, ACNE saw the need to have its own U.S. roost spanning film and web content. Shop was set up in Venice, Calif., and former RSA exec producer Fran McGivern was chosen to manage the operation.
The collective has already wrapped the first job under the ACNE US banner, a worldwide campaign for Garmin navigational devices via Tierney Advertising, Minneapolis. This represented repeat business in that ACNE turned out Garmin’s “Moose” back when the account was at Fallon, Minneapolis (with Brian Tierney as group creative director), which earned an AICP Show honor in ’07.
Skoging described the formation of ACNE US as a natural progression given the collective’s growing footprint. In a sense that creative imprint is reflected in its recent EA campaign for Wieden+Kennedy, Amsterdam, the centerpiece of which consisted of a couple four-minute films, each a mini-event akin to live sports coverage of a soccer game–one pitting Real Madrid against Manchester United, the other between Schalke 04 and Lyons FC.
A star player from each team was on hand for the games–which were being played in the context of the EA Sports soccer videogame online in four different nations and showcased on large scoreboard-sized screen projections in cities in each country. Watching the games as if attending an actual game were huge throngs of rabid fans in their home team neighborhood venues.
“Originally we were going to do it all live–it would be shot and shown live,” recalled Skoging who was one of four ACNE directors on the project. “But logistics didn’t make that feasible. Still, we filmed it all as if it were a live sporting event–with five or six cameras at each venue, a technical director switching from one camera to another, and crowds of fans acting like fans. No one was shouting instructions to them. Everything you see represents their true feelings, love, hate, joy and dismay.”
Skoging added that ACNE engaged “a television crew rather than our normal film crew talent in order to convey that real live sports event feeling.”
ACNE shot in the four countries–Spain, the U.K., France and Germany–within 10 days. The four ACNE directors were Johan Dahlqvist and Jacob Marky on Real Madrid vs. Manchester United, and Skoging and Marcus Svanberg on Schalke 04 vs. Lyons FC. However there were many shared contributions with all four directors on location and involved in the films.
“We traveled together on the road–it was like we were a rock band on European tour,” quipped Skoging, “except we weren’t drunk and we acted responsibly. We had to in order to pull off this project.”
The four-minute film featuring the Real Madrid and Manchester game aired on TV in the U.K. during an actual game between Manchester and Chelsea. Both four-minute videogame events otherwise gained their principal exposure on the web.
Additionally ACNE handled the web portion of the EA campaign, which featured hours of content giving viewers the opportunity to not only watch the entire games but also to choose vantage points and camera angles. Visitors were encouraged to share their thoughts, including predictions as to the winning teams and the final game scores. “It was an ambitious production–we used three producers and the agency was very supportive,” said Skoging. “This was quite different from any project we had ever done.”
As for those other projects, ACNE’s spot work over the years includes such brands as Nike, Coca-Cola, Volvo, Burger King, Comcast, Guinness, Tele2, Sprite, Visa and ESPN. And the awards recognition has come from assorted competitions, such as the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, the AICP Show, the New York Festivals and the Golden Egg, Epica and Eurobest shows.
ACNE’s first major ad splash stateside was ESPN’s “Shelfball” for Wieden+Kennedy, N.Y., which went on to earn a Gold Lion at Cannes in ’03.
Meanwhile ACNE’s stateside presence isn’t confined to its production house in Venice. Earlier this year the creative collective opened its first fashion store in America, situated in Manhattan’s downtown SoHo neighborhood.
“It’s been a big year of openings for us in America,” summed up Skoging.
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