By Nicole Rivard

Carl Erik Rinsch believes in the notion of faith fueling great advertising.
He says the reason why there’s good commercials or bad commercials or directors who you hear about and those you don’t is because there is somebody who has the guts to back them up, and back up the energy and spirit of what they are trying to do. “If you can find people who have the guts and the faith to support you or that trust their own instinct and that trust you, then you don’t lose,” says Rinsch, who helms spots via RSA, with offices in London, Los Angeles and New York.
    Case in point was one of his most recent spots, which he directed for the Once Foundation, the Spanish national organization that runs a lottery to provide free education, free healthcare and jobs to blind people in Spain. The commercial was for the first scratch and win lottery ticket. Rinsch explains that everyone who works for the organization is blind. The foundation asked him to create a duende, which can be translated in Spanish literally as goblin, or loosely translated as spirit, passion or life. The client wanted the creature to be both a “goblin” and personify this inexplicable “passion.”
    The resulting spot shows people chasing and embracing these tiny huggable monkey-like creatures, which represent not only the opportunity provided by the lottery but the good that comes from participating in the lottery in the first place.
    “Imagine creating a character, filming it and going through postproduction with somebody who is blind. I would have to use his hand and trace his finger on the screen and say, ‘Well, we are going to put a little guy in here, and here is a woman’s face and she’s looking down there, even though it wasn’t created yet. He could project in his mind’s eye what it was going to look like and be able to make a decision. Everyone worked off of faith. And it turned out to be a huge success,” says Rinsch, who splits his time between living in Los Angeles and in Madrid with his girlfriend.
    He says that he takes a sensory approach to spots and puts a little of himself into every single one. Dialogue is infrequent in his commercials–instead he utilizes every possible camera angle, every lighting option and every human emotion to create an aura that he can call his own. This approach has boded particularly well for him in Europe.
    In America, the agency who appreciates his perspective and has the most faith in him is Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami. In addition to CP+B, Jules Daly, president of RSA, has been extremely supportive of his projects. “Without their faith and support, I’d be a goner. You’ve seen my reel. A lot of the stuff on my reel is nuts. How in the world would anyone think this is going to sell a can of soda or sell a car?” Rinsch says with a laugh.
    CP+B backed him up last year when they collaborated on Sprite’s subLYMONal spot featuring LeBron James. In the spot, we see James’ take on the subLYMONal experience. He and his friends engage in a game of Lymon Paintball to refresh taste buds with thirst-quenching lymon pellets. Lemon and lime imagery appears throughout the spot to further reinforce the refreshing flavor of Lymon.
    “It’s a very collaborative process when you work with CP+B. They work on faith and they work on instinct and that’s how I like to work too. So we signed on to do a job where there was basically a script that we never shot. It changed and got thrown out and reworked. We came up with our own ideas and started bouncing things off of eachother,” Rinsch says.
    He explains that he had this beautiful antique African mask from his childhood, and he suggested creating a version of it in yellow and green for the paintball players to wear in the spot. Sure enough, they appear wearing these strange masks and suits.
    “When we got there to be quite honest we weren’t 100 percent sure of what we were shooting. Three or four days before we were shooting we had no script,” Rinsch says. “For me filmmaking has always been fun. So I said let’s just play around and have fun; let’s bring spirit back into all of this. Let’s just get back to why we do this in the first place–because it’s exciting and we love it. CP+B has that approach, and that’s why they are so successful, because they have fun in the same way I had fun when I was doing it when I was 14.”
    It was at the age of 14 that Rinsch had his first film shown at both the New York and the Telluride Film Festivals. In an effort to put his artistic abilities to good use, the Los Angeles native decided to attend Brown University in Rhode Island where he studied both art and English.  Since becoming a member of the RSA team, in addition to Sprite he has been commissioned by the likes of Earthlink, the Sci Fi Channel and BMW.
    He just finished a project for BMW that will air in April, which he worked on with visual effects house Digital Domain, Venice, Calif. “It is to die for. It is the coolest thing you will ever see, It’s the oldest trick in the book. The idea was how do you grow a car like a plant would grow. And we were able to do it with the help of Digital Domain.”
    In addition to spots, Rinsch currently is writing and directing his first feature film, designing a video game and writing a book. So when does he have time for hobbies? 
    “People think I have a problem because I don’t have a quote-on-quote hobby,” Rinsch says.
    “My work is the thing I love. I was doing it before I got paid to do it. It’s the thing I find most enjoyable, it just happens to be my job. I’m hoping nobody clues into the fact that I would do it for free if they asked me,” he says with a laugh.

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