Two trends seem to characterize the half dozen up-and-coming spot directors featured in SHOOT’s Fall Directors Issue. First, there are a lot more than six of them—two are directing teams, while a third is a collective. Second, four of the six come from the world of music videos, including three who specialize in videos with heavy doses of CGI and motion graphics. What those trends portend is hard to say, except that these directors will certainly add to the growing variety and diversity of the advertising landscape.
Olivier "Twist" Gondry
Gondry’s first directing credit came as something of a surprise to him. As a CGI special effects artist, Gondry had for years been working his visual magic on music videos and commercials, including several directed by his well-known older brother, Michel Gondry, of bicoastal/international Partizan. One of those works was a January 2002 video for "Star Guitar" by the Chemical Brothers.
"It was Michel’s video," recalls Gondry, "but after I brought a lot to the music video, Michel said it was a co-direction. That was pretty much [how I began] directing, but when I was doing the job I never thought I was directing it. I never wanted to be a director, but I’d been on set shooting many times, so I knew how it worked. When Michel came up with this idea of me directing, I said, ‘I would love to. I’ll try my best.’ I’m just starting now to think, okay, this can be my new job."
Like Michel, Olivier is on the roster of Partizan, where he just finished his first U.S. commercial job, the Infiniti Q45 spot "Crowded," out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles. Like much of his music video work, the spot contains a lot of movement, following a Q45 owner who leisurely walks and drives through a crowded Chicago street scene that is moving at hyper speed.
Unusual movement plays a role in much of Gondry’s work. "Star Guitar" seems to be shot from the window of a moving train, with the same posts, buildings and train cars passing by repeatedly in perfect sync with the music. In the video for Lacquer’s "Behind"—which the brothers co-directed—Gondry and his DP, David Lanzenberg, shot continuously from the back seat of a convertible on a trip from Los Angeles to New York. The whole journey was compressed down to four minutes of blinding time-lapse speed. "We crossed the country in seven days," Gondry relates. "We stopped the camera for maybe ten or fifteen minutes the whole trip."
Gondry’s first commercial directing job, "Mortgage," for the U.K. bank Nationwide and its agency Leagas Delaney, London, was shot last March. The ad came directly from effects work Gondry had done on his brother’s video for Kylie Minogue’s "Come into My World." In the video, Minogue walks through a street scene until she comes full circle to encounter herself, an image she follows through the same streetscape.
"They liked Michel’s video of Kylie Minogue," Gondry says. "They wanted to use that idea." In the Nationwide spot, the camera pans down a block of houses into which couples of varying means are moving into, the message being that the bank provides mortgages for all levels of earners. On closer examination, however, all the couples turn out to be the same two people.
Gondry was trained as a computer code writer in his native France, and got into visual effects when he started doing some CGI work for his brother; Gondry eventually joined BUF Compagnie, Paris, to hone his craft. "Because I was a code writer and I made the code on special effects, I was doing my own stuff," he recalls. "[I used] my own tools to do special effects."
After two years with visual effects house Method, Santa Monica, the Gondry brothers formed Twisted Laboratories, Los Angeles, and Olivier Gondry concentrated on working on Michel’s spots and videos. Today, Olivier Gondry continues to live in Paris, but spends considerable time in the U.S. For now, he is pretty much taking life as it comes, working on another Infiniti spot and talking with his brother about doing a video together after Michel completes his current feature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
"I’m getting treatments for commercials, but I may take a break to do more music videos," Gondry says. "Michel and I are talking now about doing a video together, but we have no idea if we will do it. I would love to do a documentary, but I don’t know if I would have the patience. I have no idea. Maybe in a couple of years I’ll say I’ve been doing this for three years—now I’d like to do something coming from my mind."
Robert Jitzmark
Robert Jitzmark is a Swedish director who finds Ingmar Bergman boring, likes humor in his work and is working on what he thinks may be a 20-year project to write a screenplay for a feature that he describes as "Twin Peaks meets Europe in the sixteenth century."
Jitzmark, who has been directing music videos and commercials in Europe since ’96, signed with bicoastal/international Hungry Man this summer, and just finished directing his first U.S. project, an eight-spot campaign for Puma International out of Gyro Worldwide, Philadelphia.
Although the shoot was challenging—eight spots in three days in Jamaica—Jitzmark enjoyed the experience. "You feel more spoiled when you work for an American company," he says. "It was a nice experience, real professional. I don’t say the Swedish are not professional, but this was really smooth. I was impressed by the Jamaican crew as well."
Jitzmark brought in an old friend, Swedish DP Pär Ekberg, to shoot the spots. "I know him so well, and I thought it would be nice to work with someone I knew with time so short," explains Jitzmark. "We work really well together."
A job in France prevented the director from sitting in on the first cut, but Gyro brought him in to participate in the rest of the post work. "I love to be involved in the editing," Jitzmark says. "The agency said, ‘If you want to do the online and sound editing, we would love you to do it.’ So I went to New York to do the telecine and sound design and work a little more on the edit."
Born in Göteborg, Sweden, Jitzmark moved to Stockholm in ’92 to study advertising at RMI-Berghs, a marketing and advertising school. "I wanted to be an art director," he says, "but I found out I loved working with moving pictures. I changed direction and started to study scriptwriting. I’ve always loved feature films, but I hadn’t thought of studying film."
Jitzmark joined Petterson Akerlund, Stockholm, in ’95, editing and working with director Jonas Akerlund. He eventually moved on to Mekano Film & Television, Stockholm, doing music videos and working as an assistant director. "After some time, I got a chance to do my own commercials," he says. "Some projects appeared, and that’s the way I got started."
His breakthrough spot, which he co-directed with Jesper Ericstam for Mekano, was a ’99 Hyundai ad, "Toy Boy," out of Leo Burnett, Stockholm. In the spot, a middle-aged woman in a Hyundai spots her husband in the next lane when they both reach a stoplight, and she hides her young boyfriend by reclining his seat. They wave and she drives off. The punch line is that the husband has hidden his own young boyfriend the same way. In ’01, "Toy Boy" received the "Gay.com and PlanetOut.com Gayest Commercial of All Time Award" from a San Francisco group called PlanetOut Partners.
"That [ad] had quite a big impact on the advertising market," Jitzmark says. "After that, I got jobs from [all over] Europe. Before that, it was mostly Sweden." Jitzmark enjoys using humor and he prefers the silliness of Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther movies to the angst of Ingmar Berman’s. "Humor is kind of hard to do because you have your own sense of humor, and humor is so different in different markets," he says. "Swedish humor may not work in France or the United States. I definitely like to do things that are a little bit different. I like odd stuff. It should have some attitude, I think."
For now, Jitzmark continues to live in Stockholm, where he and three partners have their own production company, Camp David. But if the workload merits it, the director says he’s not opposed to relocating to the States.
Logan
Ben Conrad and Alexei Tylevich met at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the mid-’90s, but didn’t really hook up until they both wound up in Los Angeles pursuing separate careers in graphic design. Sharing workspace—and occasionally clients—led to collaboration on graphic work for commercials, film titles and fashion-oriented projects. And collaboration on motion graphics projects led to the formation of the production company Logan, and a decision to direct music videos under that name. Logan’s highly stylized videos, which marry motion graphics and live action, ultimately led to commercial work and the directors’ signing earlier this year with bicoastal Anonymous Content.
"I’m really happy we’re taking part in this sort of resurgence of graphic filmmaking," Tylevich says. "It’s different things developing simultaneously in different places without really communicating. StyleWar, for instance, started doing music videos at almost the same time we did, and they come from a graphics background too."
In school, Conrad majored in film and photography, developing a keen interest in digital filmmaking. Tylevich, whose parents worked on feature films in his native Belarus before moving to the States, majored in design and animation. "Directing was definitely in the back of our minds," Tylevich says. "Ben directed some short films in school, and I worked on an animated short film."
Conrad notes that Logan’s skills and interests lay in graphics, animation and photography. "All of those, to us, would lend themselves perfectly to the type of filmmaking we want to do," he says.
Their first video, for alternative rocker Money Mark’s "Information Contraband," was an almost totally motion-graphic expression of the synthesizer guitar-driven tune. "That was exactly what our philosophy is about," Conrad says. "What we wanted to do was bring this graphic language into filmmaking. It seemed to catch on with clients. They responded to it very well."
In their first year, the duo directed five clips for the likes of Jurassic 5 ("What’s Golden?") and No Doubt ("Underneath It All," co-directed by Sophie Muller of Oil Factory, Hollywood and London). They produced these clips themselves, and attracted a lot of interest from established commercial and music video production companies.
Just over a year ago, they did a Nike Lady Foot Locker’s "Action Hero," out of Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore., which was produced via Little Minx, Los Angeles. (Little Minx has an association with bicoastal RSA USA and RSA Films, London.) Logan didn’t sign with RSA, however. "We weren’t ready to sign with a solid production company," Tylevich explains, "but we were talking to a number of them."
After the Nike job, Logan saw commercials as the next logical step and realized that it needed the clout of a major production company. Earlier this year they signed with Anonymous. The directors’ first jobs there were two spots for Target stores, "Fall Music Partners" and "Back to College," out of Peterson Milla Hooks, Minneapolis. Like the Nike spot, these ads are mixes of live action and motion graphics, with the look of music videos.
Conrad and Tylevich say they are happy that agencies are picking up on their music video techniques, but they are looking forward to moving into other areas. "With Target, there were certain aspects of Money Mark and also Jurassic 5 picked out, which is fine because you can expand on them," Tylevich relates, "but we definitely don’t want to deliver the same look over and over again."
The duo is making a conscious effort to attract work that is more dialogue-driven and into storytelling. To that end, they are now developing a live-action short film based on a Japanese comic book. "That would be good for us," Conrad says of the project. "There’s dialogue and a story. Hopefully, we’ll be able to put together a nice overall package for it. It’s going to be done early next year with an independent company in Japan that owns the rights to the comic book."
Conrad cites ’70s filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) and Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill) as influences. "We’re in love with a lot of Japanese cinema from the sixties," he says. "It has a real graphic slant to it, it’s heavily art directed, and a lot of the storytelling is done through the art direction."
"Michel Gondry is a hero for us," Tylevich adds. "We’ve seen a first cut from his upcoming feature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s unbelievable. It’s actually taking a narrative and applying the visual language he’s developed, and making it into a unique blend."
Jake Nava
"Crazy in Love," a video for Beyoncé Knowles featuring Jay-Z, directed by Jake Nava, may have won three MTV Video Music Awards—Best R&B Video, Best Female Video and Best Choreography—last month, but he is determined not to be known as a music video director who also does spots. "We’re only just starting to think about commercials because it’s been such a whirlwind in music videos," he says. "But I’m a filmmaker. I’ll make a good music video and I’ll make a good commercial, given the chance, if it’s a good script and I’m working with good people. And as soon as possible, I hope to start making good films."
Earlier this year, Nava directed a five-spot Puma campaign out of Gyro—including the ads "Haircut" and "The Cut"—and Lego’s "Clickits," from Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R, London; both jobs were done through now defunct Harry Nash, which had repped Nava in the U.K. About five months ago, he signed with F.M. Rocks, Santa Monica, where he is currently in discussions on work for a leading mobile phone company.
Although he acknowledges that he is still primarily known as a music video director who specializes in urban, hip-hop videos, Nava notes that he has many diverse influences. His own background is about as diverse as one can get—the son of an Austrian-Dutch mother and a Black-Mexican father, Nava received what he calls a "Bohemian upbringing" in London, where his father was in a theater group with director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas).
"There is certainly an ethnic strain in my personality, but equally a European one," he says. "Maybe what you see in my work is a mixture of influences. I’ve always felt like a person of mixed descent and influence. Hopefully, that comes out in my work. And hopefully that means I can do work that appeals to and is relevant to a variety of cultures. I try to break down conventional barriers in my imagery, not out of some sort of political agenda, but because I think creatively it makes work more interesting when you don’t see the same old stuff."
Nava cites the "Crazy in Love" video as an example. "With that job I managed to fuse a kind of high-fashion sensibility or edge, yet still keep it relevant to the urban market," he relates. "I think I made Beyoncé appeal to the non-urban market, without alienating her core people."
Doing things with a twist is what appeals to Nava. "The last commercial campaign I did in Europe was for Puma, and they’re very quirky and offbeat. I enjoyed it because it’s totally wacky. The Beyoncé thing is about glamour and beauty and all that, while Puma is about comedy and narrative and characterizations."
Nava studied film at the University of Westminster, London, and gravitated toward music videos for European acts afterwards. After about four years of directing in Europe, a video for the Cranberries caught the eye of F.M. Rocks earlier this year. "The Beyoncé video was my third job here," Nava says. "[But] I continue to be interested in doing English music videos because they give me the opportunity to do stuff very different from what I’ve become in demand for over here."
Although he’s in the process of relocating to the U.S., Nava wants to use his time in the U.K. to keep in touch with what’s hot there in commercials. "The good stuff in England is really good," he says. "It’s nice to have been around those influences. I’m quite fresh to the American market and hopefully I’ll bring a fresh eye to the commercials. I think I have a good understanding of hipness and what young people are aspiring to. That might be what people want me to make for them but that’s not all that interests me."
When he turns to feature films, Nava’s tastes gravitate toward the lower-budget, independent variety. "I love all different kinds of filmmaking," he says. "The film I loved most recently was City of God by Fernando Meirelles. It just had such power. I like seeing a surprising combination of influences in something."
Smukler/Samuels
Matt Smukler and Kevin Samuels met in the early ’90s at what is now Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, where Smukler was a copywriter and Samuels an art director on the Saturn account. From there, they took divergent paths before hooking up to direct about a year ago. Smukler moved over to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco, while Samuels set out on two years of global travel. "When I was traveling," Samuels says, "I met an underground filmmaker in Turkey and we ended up shooting a lot of film there. I wound up in advertising briefly after that, but realized that directing was what I wanted to do."
The two kept in touch during all that time and began eventually directing together, drawing from their agency experience. "We started out doing some client-direct stuff … for Caroliva Olive Oil and Guayakí Yerba Mate Tea," Samuels says. "The Caroliva work was a GS&P job that we were able to write and direct. In the beginning we were doing both the creative and the directing. We were always open to doing that."
The spots for Caroliva, "Spaghetti" and "Cabbage," and Guayakí Yerba Mate Tea’s "Birthday," have the look of commercials out of a boutique creative shop—low in budget but strong in quirky humor. "I think they all have a nice film quality, but the ideas are a bit out there," Samuels says. "As the reel started to come together, it had a definite voice and it was different from most of the stuff we saw out there. I think that was a good thing for us."
The kinds of things they wanted to work on, Smukler adds, "were projects that we really love and that we would do if we were at an agency. It sort of works for us." Since then, the pair has signed with bicoastal Epoch Films, and shot "Eyeball," for the OK47 clothing line out of agency Beard, Toronto. Currently, the pair is working on two spots for Ace Hardware, as well as an undisclosed project, all out of GS&P. Of the Ace spots, Smukler says, "We’re still tackling these little moments and hoping to get real situations from people. That’s what these have—they’re not as weird as our other stuff, but they’re funny. We do love humor and that’s our forte up to this point. We’d both love to get into more visual spots."
So far, the team approach has been smooth as both men draw on their experiences from the agency side. Smukler jokes that sometimes they are close to being Kyle and Efram, referring to novice directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle on the HBO series Project Greenlight, but he quickly adds, "We agree on almost everything. For two people, ending up with a singular vision can be tricky, but I think we’ve nailed it. We’re used to working collaboratively. That’s our background."
Samuels adds that they share a sense for the type of people they want to cast. "We definitely look for a bit of an odd character when we do that," he says. "When we’re on the set, Matt seems to take over the duties of working with the talent, and I definitely put more into the visual aspect of it. It really works well."
The two reckon that they’ve been on some 200 shoots during their agency years, and they’ve been able to work with some of the industry’s best commercial directors. Ones who have had a big impact on them include Phil Morrison at Epoch, Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, and Bryan Buckley of Hungry Man. The pair also admires feature directors such as Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness), Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen.
Still new to directing, the pair have no burning ambitions in the feature film arena, but they did recently direct their first music video, for the Icelandic singer/songwriter Lindy. "We’re loving commercials," Smukler says. "And we loved the video. We wanted to do concept videos. We wrote three treatments and [Lindy] loved one idea of a couples’ sex retreat where he acts as the guru."
StyleWar
The Swedish collective StyleWar, just now off its first U.S. commercial job—a six-spot campaign for Ikea, out of Crispin Porter+ Bogusky (CP+B), Miami—is already a hot commodity. Its music video for Moby’s "In This World" was featured in the most recent Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival.
In taking on the Ikea job, produced via bicoastal Smuggler—the collective’s U.S. spot roost—StyleWar follows in the footsteps of such big name directors as Spike Jonze and Clay Williams of bicoastal/ international Morton Jankel Zander, and Wes Anderson, who does spot work through bicoastal Moxie Pictures.
The spots are designed to show that Ikea has furniture for any budget. In "Pony," a living room undergoes decorating changes, seemingly by itself, as different price figures are mentioned. The punch line is that at a certain price, the living room can even afford to feature a live pony. In "Bedroom" and "Family Room," three different makeovers are shown for $770 and $790, respectively, using what appears to be ultra-fast time-lapse photography.
What characterizes StyleWar’s video and spot work is a seamless blending of motion graphics and live action, a style that developed out of the group’s grounding in graphic design. Four members of StyleWar studied graphic design at Forsbergs, Stockholm, during the mid- to late-’90s, while the rest brought backgrounds in 3-D animation, computer programming and other related fields. Comprising StyleWar are: Jakob Dahlstrom, Gustav Dejert, Filip Engström, Kalle Haglund, Oskar Holmedal, Martin Sjostrom and Mans Swanberg.
"We’ve been together about four years," says Holmedal of the group. "Originally, we were more in graphic design and motion design. When we started to do more film title sequences, we added film skills, and the style sort of came out of that. Then we started to do music videos and went on from there."
"In This World" is high concept, the premise being that a posse of small aliens, designed and animated by StyleWar, arrive on earth with a message of friendship, but are too tiny to be seen by the self-absorbed humans. The video is evidence that StyleWar is able to bring a wide variety of skills and talents to a project, and in many cases is able to see projects through from beginning to end. "We like to hang around in a project for a longer time than other people seem to," Holmedal says. "Postproduction and visual effects can be big part of how an idea comes through. We like to be very involved."
Working with CP+B meant a little less control than they were used to—as is the case with most U.S. agencies—but Holmedal says that what is less involvement to StyleWar is perceived as heavy involvement by the agency. "We’re used to doing everything ourselves, from the day you’re awarded the job, but in cooperation with the agency," relates Engström, who often takes the lead on directing live action (he edited the Ikea spots). "We’re used to having more input in the postproduction—[not being involved is] something that’s new to us. There’s nothing bad about it, it’s just different for us."
While there may seem to be similarities between StyleWar and Traktor of Partizan, another Swedish collective, Holmedal and Engström doubt there are many similarities, except perhaps that both groups like quirky humor. "My guess is that we come from more of a variety of backgrounds," Engström says, "but I’m just guessing." (The name StyleWar comes from Style Wars, the ’83 documentary on New York graffiti artists by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant.)
The StyleWar modus operandi on a project is to have everyone involved at some point, according to Holmedal. "We try as much as possible to have everyone’s input in the beginning," he relates. "The people who have the most interest in a project, who have ideas for it, are the people who are going to work with it."
Current projects include a video for a Finnish group and some other work that remains under wraps. Future plans are up in the air. "We’re not so well planned on where we’re going," Engström says. "We’re just trying to do stuff that’s fun and interesting. We want very much to have that kind of feeling in the office and just do good stuff. It doesn’t matter where it ends up really. Everyone is busy, and I think it’s going to be like that for a while."
