By Robert Goldrich

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. --

Cinematographer Robert Richardson ASC, and editors Angus Wall, ACE, and Kirk Baxter are hardly strangers to the Academy Awards–nor to the commercialmaking community. Richardson won the Best Cinematography Oscar last night for director Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, marking the DP’s third career Oscar, the others for JFK and The Aviator. Richardson is a seven-time Academy Award nominee. On the spot biz front, he has shot his share of commercials over the years (Richardson is repped across the board for short and long-form fare by The Skouras Agency). Plus Richardson continues to field select commercial directing assignments via production house Tool of North America.

As for Wall and Baxter, they won the Best Editing Oscar for the second straight year, this time around for director David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In 2011 they earned the honor for another Fincher film, The Social Network. Wall and Baxter are also accomplished commercial editors, their roost being Rock Paper Scissors. (Fincher’s commercialmaking home is production house Anonymous Content.)

Messrs. Richardson, Wall and Baxter head a field of artisans with spot ties who came up Oscar winners last night. Rob Legato and Ben Grossmann for example were part of the Best Visual Effects Oscar winning team on Hugo.

Legato served as overall VFX supervisor on the film. This marks his second VFX Oscar win; the first coming back in 1998 as a member of the effects team on Titanic. Legato is represented by Moxie Pictures as a director for commercials and branded content.

Grossmann is VFX supervisor at Pixomondo which is active in long form as well as commercials. In SHOOT‘s Visual Effects & Animation feature last month (2/17), Grossmann reflected on the greatest challenges posed by Hugo from a visual effects perspective. Grossmann observed, “The greatest technical challenge on Hugo was also a creative challenge, as we had to adapt our techniques to reflect Marty’s [Martin Scorsese’s] vision for early filmmaking. Hugo revolves around the pioneer of our craft, Georges Melies, and as such, we wanted to pay homage to him as much as possible. It gave us a great challenge to do things differently and create some of the visual effects the way he would have.

“Melies was a genius,” continued Grossmann. “We didn’t fully appreciate his work until we really started studying his films during pre-production. Once we had absorbed his body of work more fully, we came away with the inspiration and techniques to tackle many of the film’s visual challenges. Rather than immediately jump to the latest technology to tackle every challenge Marty gave us, we started with the simplest and oldest methods first, and worked our way to the modern day approaches as a “last resort.”

“For example, we had to create a shot where Sasha Baron Cohen is dragged by a train, but we had a train that couldn’t move. In Melies’ films, he would create the illusion of something moving or growing by actually moving the opposite thing. So instead of moving the train, we built the set around it on wheels, positioned actors and props on it, and moved the platform. It gave us a convincing, nearly in-camera solution to a 100-year-old problem.

“Another scene,” noted Grossmann, “required a wind-up mouse to give a directed performance. Rather than make a computer-generated mouse, we opted for another old Melies trick, stop-motion animation. The mouse prop was animated and photographed one frame at a time, to create the illusion of movement, and then composited with the live-action performances of Sir Ben Kingsley and Asa Butterfield. We also used a lot of fun old tricks–like miniatures and timelapse photography–that swept us into the spirit of Melies’ work and helped create the essence of the film. Although there was cutting-edge technology employed to create the stereoscopic VFX, we approached everything the way we thought Melies the Magician might have if he were here today and that is a big reason Hugo has resonated with audiences.”

Grossmann also has a filmography which includes directing commercials. In fact, back in 2007, he was included in SHOOT‘s fifth annual New Directors Showcase.

 Meanwhile, winning this year’s Best Animated Feature Film Oscar was Rango, directed by Gore Verbinski who is among the select feature filmmakers on the Anonymous Content roster repped for commercials. 

 Garnering this year’s Best Feature Documentary Academy Award was Undefeated, directed by TJ Martin and Dan Lindsay who along with producer Richard Middlemass received Oscars. Seth Gordon, also a producer on Undefeated, is himself a notable director and on the commercials roster of Moxie Pictures. 

Short stories
Winning the Documentary Short Subject Oscar was Saving Face, co-directed by Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Junge recently joined the directorial roster of Futuristic Films for advertising and branded content. Saving Face introduces us to Dr. Mohammad Jawad who returns to his Pakistan homeland to help victims of acid burns. We see the women who are recovering and reclaiming their lives, and another woman who fights to see that the perpetrators of this crime are brought to justice. This marks the first Oscar win for Junge whose first Academy Award nomination came in 2010 for the short subject documentary The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner.

Meanwhile earning the Oscar for Best Animated Short was The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, directed by author/illustrator William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg who’s with Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana. The film shows us a powerful storm which whisks a young man off to a place where books are living entities, underscoring a world to which book lovers everywhere can relate. The short’s collaborators have also worked in commercials. For example, composer John Hunter of Breed Music, Dallas, scored Lessmore. Breed and Oldenburg have teamed in the past on ad campaigns. Breed’s spot clients include Budweiser, BMW, Comcast and Coca-Cola. Audio post mix on Lessmore was done by Scottie Richardson of Fast Cuts Edits, a Dallas house active in commercials.

Nominees
The aforementioned Oscar winners emerged from a field of nominees this year with spotmaking ties. Janusz Kaminski was nominated for Best Cinematography for his lensing of War Horse; he is represented as a commercial director by Independent Media. Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, was nominated for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Cronenweth, who also shoots commercials, additionally serves as half of the directing team The Cronenweths, paired with his brother Tim Cronenweth and handled by Los Angeles production house Untitled Inc.

Moneyball, nominated for Best Picture, was directed by Bennett Miller whose commercialmaking home is Smuggler. Best Picture nominee Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was directed by Roger Daldry who is repped for spots by Saville Productions.

Earning a nomination for Best Feature Documentary was Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, a production of @radical.media and directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. A transmedia house active in advertising and branded entertainment. @radical handles Berlinger as an individual director and Berlinger & Sinofsky as a helming team for select projects in the ad arena.

Director J.C. Chandor, who recently came aboard Washington Square Films (WSF) for commercials, earned a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for Margin Call, which he also directed. WSF produced Margin Call, a Wall Street-themed thriller.

Another name familiar to the ad community, sound designer Ren Klyce of Mit Out Sound, earned a pair of Oscar nominations this year, both for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Klyce is nominated in the Sound Editing category and is part of an ensemble earning a nom for Sound Mixing.

Contributing to films nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar were such VFX studios as Weta FX on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Digital Domain and Legacy Effects on Real Steel.

Garnering an Oscar nomination for the second consecutive year was director Lucy Walker, who’s on the spot roster of Supply&Demand Integrated. She’s got nominated in the Documentary Short Subject category for The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, produced by Supply&Demand Integrated. (Walker earned a Best Feature Documentary Oscar nomination last year for her film Waste Land.) The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom plays like a poem about the people of Japan and how they are coping with the devastating earthquake which hit the country on March 11, 2011, resulting in a horrific tsunami as well as a nuclear radiation crisis. For many Japan residents, the inspiration to persevere and come out the other side hopeful and renewed comes from the ancient Japanese cherry blossom which grows in the spring, signaling a new beginning, a new opportunity.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom was cut by Aki Mizutani of Cutters Editorial.

Meanwhile nominated in the Short Film (Animated) category was A Morning Stroll, directed by Grant Orchard whose spotmaking roost is London-based Studio AKA (which produced A Morning Stroll). The short centers on the meeting of a man and a chicken on a busy New York street–a story told three times over three different time periods. The repetition of each segment has a cumulative effect on the narrative, and each period (set decades apart) influences how that meeting between man and chicken plays out.

Also nominated in the Short Film (Animated) category was Wild Life, directed by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, a duo repped for commercials by Acme Filmworks. Set in the early 1900s, this short tells the story of a dapper young man sent from England to Alberta to attempt ranching. It soon becomes clear that nothing in his refined upbringing prepared him for the harsh conditions of the new world into which he’s been thrust.
    And nominated in the Short Subject Documentary category was The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement, co-directed by Robin Fryday and the late Gail Dolgin. Fryday recently joined Nonfiction Unlimited for representation in spots and client-sponsored documentary projects.

MySHOOT Profiles