Director Nina Davenport has signed with New York-based Half Baked Productions for commercial representation.
Davenport is best known for the feature-length documentary Always a Bridesmaid, which chronicles the filmmaker’s preoccupation with marriage, as well as her relationship with a commitment-shy boyfriend. Always a Bridesmaid premiered at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in April, and subsequently was shown on Cinemax’s Reel Life series and on Channel Four in the U.K. Sev-enth Art Releasing, Los Angeles, will release the film in spring 2001. Davenport has also directed promos for the program Greater Boston Arts, on public television station WGBH, Boston.
The Bloomfield Hills, Mich., native had originally planned to be a photographer, but during her senior year as a visual studies student at Harvard University, she took a film class. "It was instant love," Davenport recalled. She was awarded a Gardner Fellowship from Harvard, and following her ’90 graduation, spent the year traveling in India, accompanied by a Bolex camera. When she returned, Davenport became a teaching assistant at Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and she worked on her footage from India, as well. This would eventually become the 56-minute black-and-white film Hello Photo.
Hello Photo premiered at the Rotterdam (the Netherlands) International Film Festival in January ’95. The film subsequently won the award for best documentary at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Melbourne, and for best black-and-white cinematography from the Cork International Film Festival in Cork, Ireland, both in ’95.
Davenport has also served as a freelance director, producer and cinematographer for PBS and National Geographic Television. In ’95-’96, she worked as an assistant editor for documentary director Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March), on his film Six O’Clock News.
In ’97, Davenport went to Guanajuato, Mexico, on a National Endowment for the Arts traveling fellowship to film Los Pericos (The Parrots), a documentary about a pair of elderly, blind street musicians who play ranchera music. She is currently up for a Rockefeller Intercultural Media Grant, which would go towards editing Los Pericos.
In ’96, Davenport began working on what would become Always a Bridesmaid. It was only when HBO offered to buy Bridesmaid, in the summer of ’99, that Davenport began to consider other directing options. "Selling my film to HBO made me get cable, and I started watching more television. I realized that these commercials are little, short films, and it made me interested in doing them," she explained.
She moved from Cambridge, Mass., to New York about a year ago. After having settled in, she said, "I started to pursue it [commercial representation] more actively." Davenport met with several companies, and when producers’ rep Jed Alpert introduced her to Half Baked’s executive producer, Elyse Roth, about a month ago, Davenport decided to sign with the company.
Davenport conjectured that her documentary filmmaking experience "will help me to direct actors in a way that will make them feel like real people." According to Davenport, conveying a sense of realism is especially important, as postproduction technology becomes ever more ubiquitous in commercials. She commented: "Special effects make audiences skeptical on some level. … I think bringing a sense of reality to commercials will be very effective." For example, "Often, pregnant pauses or stumbling over words is what can make a scene feel meaningful or funny. Those things tend to get cut out, but it could well be that those are really the moments that grab the viewer.
"I’m much more of a visual filmmaker than most documentarians, probably because of my training as a still photographer and shooting my own work," Davenport concluded. However, "Like documentary filmmakers, I understand how to draw out real people and how real people play out in scenes. I would like to recreate that in commercials."
Of the spot discipline, Davenport said she’s attracted to being confined within a 30-second framework. "That’s just something that I find inspiring artistically: to have limits, and to work within limits."
Half Baked Productions also reps director George Verschoor. Mary Ford of Mary Ford & Company, New York, serves as Half Baked’s national rep.
