True To Form--Short and Long
By Robert Goldrich
When director Jeffrey Karoff was bidding to break into commercialmaking in 2001, he had a stellar reel of corporate films for the likes of Mercedes-Benz, IBM, Toyota, Visa, Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Xerox. Two spots were culled from his Mercedes work and aired in the New York market to promote the Mercedes Tri-State Dealers. Separately he fashioned spec commercials from his other corporate films to showcase in a reel designed to elicit interest from production houses and ad agencies.
While that tact proved successful, today he probably wouldn’t have had to do so much repurposing in an increasingly longer form/branded entertainment-conscious marketplace. The unaltered corporate films themselves would have arguably caught the fancy of agencies and production companies more readily now than they would have five years ago.
Yet all’s well that ends well–even though Karoff’s career is still just beginning. He has not only firmly established himself in spotmaking via Backyard, Venice, Calif., but also made his mark in branded content, having earlier this year helmed Rusty Dogs, the first short in a series of films for Sea-Doo out of Cramer-Krasselt, Milwaukee.
The action/adventure storyline of the nearly seven-and-a-half-minute Rusty Dogs centers on an international crime in the making on a boat. The villains’ plot is thwarted by a band of former Navy Seals who operate Rusty’s, a watercraft service shop in the harbor. The rescue operation is replete with a good guy on a Sea-Doo jet ski, a high-speed chase and some tongue-in-cheek humor. The heroes use largely tools of the watercraft shop trade like pliers, wire and an audio loudspeaker system to accomplish their mission. The short was at one point described by Karoff as “Kelly’s Heroes meets MacGyver.”
Karoff found his formal film education–including training in the American Film Institute’s directing program–as being most helpful in helping to realize the creative vision for Rusty Dogs. “At AFI the importance of story was stressed to every person, no matter what the discipline he or she was being trained in. You must be true to the story. Additionally structure and the arc of the story were emphasized. With that and all my subsequent shooting experience, I was well prepared to take on the Sea-Doo project.”
Helping him along was the approach by the agency and client, as well as the chance to again collaborate with DP Anghel Decca–whom Karoff has worked with on assorted spots and corporate films–and the expertise of producer Danielle Schillling-Lovett who was brought into the project. “Danielle, who did House of 1,000 Corpses, helped us work within a limited budget given her independent filmmaking bent and experience,” says Karoff.
Karoff also praises BRP (Sea-Doo’s parent company) and Cramer-Krasselt for adhering to the self-imposed rule that the film “wasn’t a running package of Sea-Doo vehicles. The story is the star–not the jet skis.
“Not once,” says Karoff, “did I hear, ‘We’re concerned about how our product looks. Can you frame the Sea-Doo jet skis better?’ Blair Stribley [Backyard executive producer] and I had joked going into the shoot that we would have to wear t-shirts that read, ‘This is not a commercial.’ But we didn’t need that. The client and agency really got it.”
Meanwhile the past year has been heavy in car commercials for Karoff but they’re very much people-based and not of the sheet metal variety. At press time he had wrapped a Lincoln shoot for Young & Rubicam, Detroit. This came on the heels of a real-people Lincoln campaign for Uniworld, New York. Furthering his automotive reputation was the high profile General Motors campaign of 2005 from McCann Erickson, Detroit, in which the public could get employee discounts when purchasing new GM vehicles. “To have employees talking into the camera isn’t the most dynamic proposition–it can be like quicksand,” observes Karoff. “But my approach was to play off of the stiffness and sometimes awkwardness of real people, to embrace that and make it work for us, while placing them in a visually interesting environment. The pairing of the naturalism of people with a visually unusual designed scheme seemed to work.”
Indeed right after the GM spots broke, sales skyrocketed. Yet while car clients have been prominent in the mix for Karoff as of late, he has been active in other storytelling genres. For example, he directed several tug-at-the-heartstrings films about children and schools for the Robin Hood Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization that supports education, combats hunger and facilitates job placement for the impoverished in New York. Karoff’s 70mm films were screened during this year’s annual Robin Hood fund-raising event at the Javits Center.
“It was a gratifying experience to see the films play and money being raised for such a worthwhile cause,” says Karoff. “Conveying humanity in filmmaking–short or long form–is something I strive for.”
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More