Independent advertising agency St Luke’s has brought on board the senior creative team of Phillip Meyler and Darren Keff. The highly awarded pair has worked with St Luke’s on a freelance basis to date, and have now joined permanently as part of the creative department.
Meyler and Keff have spent 15 years working together at some of the U.K.’s top agencies. Before joining St Luke’s, they were creative directors at M&C Saatchi, where their work included the “BetRegret” launch campaign for GambleAware and “Shout Out to my Son” for The Ben Kinsella Trust, an innovative knife crime awareness campaign that infiltrated underground radio stations.
Meyler and Keff’s previous experience includes five years at Leo Burnett where they created big populist work for McDonald’s and more societal behavior changing work such as the “Ban the Box” campaign for Business in The Community. A series of interactive pre-roll films that confronted prejudice towards ex-offenders, the campaign was credited with being the first of its kind to use the “Skip Ad” function and collected over 100 awards globally.
During this time they also produced a controversial front cover for Cosmopolitan that exposed “Honour Killings.” It featured a victim seemingly suffocating in the magazine’s plastic cover wrap to represent how she was murdered by her parents. The campaign resulted in the government declaring a National Annual Day of Memory for victims.
Prior to Leo Burnett, Meyler and Keff worked at JWT where they went from Best Newcomers at Creative Circle to a Gold Lion at Cannes for Polo’s “Snow Stamp.” They also created a host of award-winning work for brands such as Vodafone, Smirnoff, National Centre for Domestic Violence and HSBC.
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