Third Time's The Charm For DGA Award Winner
By Christine Champagne
With his third nomination, Craig Gillespie scored the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award this year for best commercial director of 2005. “I honestly did not expect it,” says Gillespie, who was up against three of his fellow directors from bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ)–Rocky Morton, Spike Jonze and Rupert Sanders–as well as Noam Murro of Los Angeles-based Biscuit Filmworks. “The work was so good from everybody that I hadn’t even gotten my hopes up. So I was surprised [when I won]. I didn’t have a speech or anything prepared.”
Winning was, well, great, of course, but Gillespie points out that the DGA Awards facilitated an opportunity for him to enjoy some social time with his fellow MJZ directors. For example, Gillespie says, he didn’t really get to know Sanders, who only joined the company within the last year, until they got to chat at a DGA-sponsored screening prior to the awards ceremony. He appreciated the chance to bond with his colleagues. “There was a real team spirit,” Gillespie shares. “Everybody was thrilled to be amongst each other.”
Gillespie, who has directed spots for clients including Saturn, Honda, Holiday Inn Express and others in recent years, nabbed the DGA honor this year based on the strength of four spots: Altoids “People of Pain” and “Fable of the Fruit Bat” out of Leo Burnett, Chicago; and Ameriquest’s “Surprise Dinner” and “Mini-Mart” via DDB Direct, Los Angeles.
Asked how he chooses the work he will direct, Gillespie says he looks for spots that will allow him “to try different things visually and not have my stuff look the same.” That said, “I like to figure out what’s best for the idea.”
In the case of the Altoids “People of Pain” and “Fable of the Fruit Bat” spots, which find a bumbling British anthropologist visiting the primitive peoples of Altoidia, Gillespie says he mimicked the look and feel of French documentaries made of Papua New Guinea in the 1960s. “They were really awkward and stiff and felt very staged,” Gillespie says, noting that stilted look and awkward execution supported the wonderfully silly premise behind the Altoids ads.
The director opted for an appropriately slicker and contemporary look for the Ameriquest “Surprise Dinner” spot, which opens on a man preparing a romantic dinner for the lady in his life only to look like a psycho when she enters the apartment and finds him clutching a knife in one hand and her fluffy white cat in the other after the feline knocks a pot of sauce off the stove.
Gillespie recently tackled Ameriquest work again, by the way, directing two new Ameriquest spots, “That Killed Him” and “Friendly Skies,” that proved popular with viewers of Super Bowl XL.
In the darkly funny “That Killed Him,” a doctor and a medical technician are standing over a patient lying in his hospital bed. The tech can’t resist using defibrillator paddles to zap a pesky fly. After the bug crashes into the patient’s chest, the tech says, “That killed him” as the patient’s wife and daughter enter the hospital room. The spot ends with the tag line “Don’t judge too quickly.”
The same tag line accompanies the risqué “Friendly Skies,” which shows a woman trying to get past a fellow airplane passenger who is asleep in his seat. But when turbulence hits, she winds up on his lap, with her skirt hitched up above her hips.
Given the strength of these two latest Ameriquest concepts, Gillespie says he couldn’t resist the chance to work on the Ameriquest campaign with DDB Direct again. “It’s rare that any campaign lasts more than a year, so it was really refreshing to see that they were going with the same campaign and being that they did, I was happy to go with it,” Gillespie says, adding, “I had a great experience with the agency the first time around.”
This isn’t the first time Gillespie has made a return appearance of sorts to take on a campaign that he previously worked on. In fact, the director recalls doing nearly a dozen spots for Washington Mutual out of Seattle’s Sedgwick Road because the work was consistently compelling.
For those of you who might have been turned away by Gillespie last year, he was actually away from spots for about eight months while he shot his first feature film. A dark comedy titled Mr. Woodcock, the film centers on a young man who returns home to try to stop his mother from marrying the gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (played by Billy Bob Thornton), whom he always hated in high school.
Gillespie enjoyed working on the film, but admits that he was excited about getting back to spot work, which offers him the opportunity to do so many different things. “Today, we’re doing massive crashes [for a car commercial],” he reports. “Last week, we were doing new Ameriquest stuff. I like being able to mix it up.”
Having directed spots for more than 10 years now and built up a successful career, one has to wonder if there is any territory within commercials that Gillespie would like to cover in the future. There is, he says. “I certainly get to see all the comedy boards which is great,” Gillespie remarks. “But in the future I’d like to do something that has more of an epic scale to it.”
TikTok and the U.S. Face Off In Court Over Law That Could Lead To A Ban Of The Popular Platform
TikTok faced off with the U.S. government in federal court on Monday, arguing a law that could ban the platform in a few short months was unconstitutional while the Justice Department said the measure is critical to eliminate a national security risk posed by the popular social media company.
Attorneys for the two sides - and content creators - appeared before a panel of three judges at a federal appeals court in Washington, where TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, are challenging the law that is forcing them to break ties by mid-January or lose one of their biggest markets in the world.
Andrew Pincus, a veteran attorney representing the two companies, argued in court that the law unfairly targets the company and runs afoul of the First Amendment because TikTok Inc. - the U.S. arm of TikTok - is an American entity. Another attorney representing creators who are also challenging the law also argued it violates the rights of U.S. speakers and is akin to prohibiting Americans from publishing on foreign-owned media outlets, such as Politico, Al Jazeera or Spotify.
"The law before this court is unprecedented and its effect would be staggering," Pincus said, adding the act would impose speech limitations based on future risks.
The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a years-long saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.
The U.S. has said it's concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. The U.S. also says the proprietary algorithm that fuels... Read More