This spring’s five directors picked by SHOOT as up and comers in the commercial world arrived from a number of different directions. Two came through MTV’s “college of production knowledge,” one was an agency creative, another started in the music video arena, and the fifth came from a fine arts background.
Whatever their similarities and differences, all five are promising commercial directors who are making their mark in the field.
LENA BEUG When Lena Beug arrived in New York in 1997 from her native Cork, Ireland, she had, at one time or another, studied German, law and fine art, but she had never considered a career in film.
A little more recently–last September– the 43rd Shark Awards Advertising Festival in Ireland named her Best International New Director and around the same time she signed with Toronto and Vancouver-based Reginald Pike for commercial representation.
Staying with relatives in Brooklyn back in ’97, she was able to use what she calls “a very random family connection” to land an internship in MTV’s on-air design department.
“I had no computer design skills so it was very much on-the-job learning, which turned out to be a better way for me to learn,” Beug says. “I was not thinking about film at all. I enjoyed working at MTV a lot but I was never one of those graphic designers who got excited enough about typography and logos and stuff like that. And then I started getting more interested in live action.”
At one point, she left MTV to work with some friends at a company they called Thingy. “It was just around the time when everyone was getting video cameras and I had just learned how to use Final Cut Pro. We started making these really bad karaoke music videos for fun. That was the first taste.”
When Thingy petered out, Beug returned to MTV and a couple years ago got to direct her first major project, the Intro Guy campaign, a dozen :30s and :15s featuring the guy who introduces new videos on the channel.
In one, “Car Alarm,” the Intro Guy hones his dance moves to the rhythms of a car alarm that he has set off intentionally. “We had so much fun figuring out who that person was,” Beug says. “He was this character who was very inspired by music and dancing, an only child of older parents.”
Other MTV directing assignments came along and late last year, Beug left to sign with Reginald Pike. Since then she has directed three spots for MADD Canada out of Saatchi & Saatchi, Toronto; “Dirty Shirt” for Hockey Canada and DDB Canada, Toronto; and a campaign for the Milk Board out of Cossette Communications-Marketing in Vancouver.
So far, much of her work has something of an MTV look. In the MADD spot “Papers,” for instance, the pirate logo on a package of rolling papers comes to life to remind a young toker that he shouldn’t drive in his condition.
“It’s funny to me,” Beug says, “that when you come out of MTV people say, ‘Oh, you’re a comedy director.’ It’s funny to me because I’m actually not that funny as a person. I like funny things, but I also like sweet things. That’s always what I hope to do. I don’t think it’s much fun to be funny at the expense of other people. It’s fun to be funny if you’re actually creating an interesting character who has a reason to be funny.”
ADAM GOLDSTEIN Directing has been on Adam Goldstein’s radar screen since grade school, but it wasn’t until he did his first spec spot a little over a year ago that he realized it was what he should be doing full time. A few weeks ago, he left his job as senior creative director/copywriter at BBDO New York and signed with bicoastal/international RSA Films.
Goldstein, 38, got started in advertising with an internship at DDB Washington while still studying English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. He went on to do multiple tours of duty with Ammirati & Puris, New York, a stint with Ogilvy & Mather, Paris, and the past six years at BBDO, where he did award-winning work for FedEx and Pepsi.
“I was always gravitating toward wanting to direct,” he says. “Finally, I shot a spec spot piggybacking on a job to see if it was as much fun as I imagined, and if I was as much of a fit for it as I was telling myself and everybody else around me. Mark Pellington [of Crossroads Films] was directing the spot I piggybacked on. I told him, ‘If I had any doubts that this is what I should be doing, they’re gone now.’ He looked at me and said, ‘What’s not to love?'”
Goldstein’s actual first job was a PSA in sixth grade, part of a promotion by a local TV station in Silver Spring, Maryland. “We wrote it, submitted it and they called us, and I basically directed a couple guys in their studio,” he recalls.
Goldstein leaned toward comedy in his spec spots. The spot with Pellington, “Hitchhiker,” was for Sirius Satellite Radio. In it, a young hitchhiker is so attracted to a driver’s Sirius radio that he accepts a ride even though there is another guy tied and gagged in the back seat. In two spots for BBDO client Levitra, Goldstein set up romantic moments at home that are ruined by a crotchety old geezer in the room. The tagline is “Tired of living with ED?”
Two client-direct PSAs for New York’s Coalition for the Homeless feature a real estate agent using jargon from high-end sales pitches to describe out-on-the-street accommodations to a homeless person.
“The Coalition for the Homeless work was just before I signed with RSA and everything else on the reel was through a few different production companies and financed through the New York State real estate bubble–I sold an apartment,” he explains.
“I really enjoy doing comedy and dialogue and performance,” Goldstein says. “I love working with talent and finding those little moments in scripts and ‘funnyisms’ that just come out and make people smile a lot. Right now I’m just loving doing performance-driven comedy.”
As he indicates, the decision to leave a good agency career wasn’t difficult. Among those offering encouragement and inspiration was Craig Gillespie of bicoastal/international MJZ, who made the same transition with great success. Former art director Gillespie was Goldstein’s creative partner at Ammirati.
“Craig Gillespie is terrific,” Goldstein says. “There is certainly no shortage of agency guys becoming directors. What I felt was that regardless of that, there is kind of a shortage of people who concentrate and focus on dialogue.”
AARON STOLLER
For about as long as he can remember, Aaron Stoller has wanted to do MTV commercials. “I loved the landscape of the channel,” he says. “It was incredibly funny to me. All the stuff I did in college had that tone.”
College was the University of Missouri at Columbia and his work in the Communications School there landed him an internship in 1997 at MTV’s On Air Promotions department in New York, which turned into a full-time job and subsequently landed him earlier this year at Backyard Productions in Venice, Calif.
While his reel is still heavy with MTV spots, he’s already gotten busy with Backyard. “I did some Pringles stuff that was a lot of fun,” he says, “and I just finished Burger King with Crispin [Porter + Bogusky, Miami] and I did a Kingsford Charcoal spot with DDB San Francisco.”
Stoller credits his MTV experience with much of his success. “It’s like the ultimate grad school,” he says. “You do it all. You write it, produce it and direct it. You’re in the marketing world as well–you’re trying to strategize and figure out new angles for the channel and new ways to promote and sell this big brand.”
And MTV provided the opportunity for a young director to work with top celebrities. “All the celebrity experience through MTV has been a blast,” he says. “When I shot with Tom Cruise, for an MTV Movie Awards spot, “I thought, how am I going to approach it. At one point, he put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘You tell me what’s funny, because I don’t know what’s funny.’ He made you feel confident.”
Stoller likes funny, especially the kind that appeals to the MTV Generation. “I think I’ve learned really well how to talk to kids,” he says, “how to shoot cool stuff without it being forced. It’s a delicate thing. I love casting. One of my trademarks is finding the obscure and shopping for freakers but getting people who aren’t just bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.”
The decision to move into commercial directing wasn’t a difficult one for Stoller. “It’s a new challenge. It’s something fresh. I felt I needed to bite something new off. I like working within the parameters of advertising. It’s not just go and make cool stuff. It’s go and make cool stuff within these confines.”
And he has the examples of past MTV directors who have made the transition successfully, including Lisa Rubisch at Bob Industries, Jim Hosking at Partizan, Brian Beletic at Smuggler and Tim Abshire at Backyard.
“When you start looking in the commercial world, you start looking at spots by people you know and your eyes open up and it’s so cool that Tim Abshire did that. Suddenly it becomes accessible. If they made that jump and are doing that really cool stuff, then so can I.”
Stoller is currently trying to get a feature comedy off the ground, but he is open to anything right now. “I’m embracing all platforms,” he says, “making cool stuff, whether it’s for broadcast or the theater or your cell phone. I want to ride this new wave, this new frontier. I want to position myself to provide good content for anything.”
JON WATTS
Things have been breaking Jon Watts’ way for a while now.
Some short films he made in high school near Colorado Springs, Colo., earned him a full scholarship at New York University. A classmate was director Brian Beletic’s sister and Watts impressed Beletic enough to land a job as his assistant after graduation in 2004. Meanwhile, Watts was making a video for a Brooklyn neighbor Jason Forrest, “Stepping Off,” which played at ResFest in Los Angeles. It got seen by the right people and led to the Fatboy Slim videos for “Wonderful Night” and “The Joker,” and not long afterwards a contract with bicoastal Smuggler. His first job for Smuggler was a campaign for 24-Hour Fitness by Publicis & Hal Riney in San Francisco keyed to the Winter Olympics in Turin. And as SHOOT went to press, he was off to South Africa for an under-wraps project.
“I had my first commercial experience doing the 24-Hour Fitness spots and I had such a great time,” Watts says. “The videos are great because it’s your idea and all that, but it’s solo, it’s pretty much all on you. I really enjoy the back and forth that happens when you’re working in commercials. They have the idea and I love coming up with variations on the idea, like getting a really good collaboration back and forth. Everybody feels like they have a part of it and I really like that.”
The 24-Hour Fitness spots feature athletes from the U.S. Winter Olympics team in different situations, with the tagline “Whatever it takes to make you better.” The three spots are clearly part of a single campaign, but they each take a different approach. “Visually, they kind of let me do what I wanted,” Watts says. “The creatives, it was like one of their first commercials too. We were all greenhorns, so it was great.”
The Fatboy Slim videos illustrate the breadth of Watts’ visual style. “Wonderful Night” starts off as a Fred Astaire-like night on the town in tux and spats, but takes a supernatural turn, while “The Joker” masquerades as a homemade amateur-contest video starring kittens.
“After I did ‘Wonderful Night,’ I was so young, people were kidding me, asking, ‘What, did you win a competition?’ That became the idea for the second video,” Watts explains. “I come from a narrative background at NYU. The storytelling element is most exciting, whether it be funny or straight or whatever.”
Watts intends to continue doing videos as well as commercials and not long ago he finished a short film called The Invisible Dog. It’s a story written by Watts about a boy who can’t have a dog because his mother is allergic. His father brings home an empty pet carrier and tells him it contains an invisible dog.
“It takes a dark twist toward the end and becomes more like a thriller,” Watts says. “That’s what I like, mixing up genres and people’s expectations. Right now, it feels like everything is game, especially in commercials. There are no real rules. That’s what’s so exciting.”
The next step may well be a feature. “I want to make a movie set in Colorado. I’m working on something right now but I don’t want to give it away,” he says. “I love the videos because you can do crazy, weird stuff and experiment. I like the commercials because of the collaboration and movies, too. It’s all part of the same thing. I just like telling stories.”
THERESA WINGERT Theresa Wingert, who signed with bicoastal MacGuffin Films in 2004, brings an artist’s sensibility to commercial directing.
A fine arts graduate from Western Washington University, she was a printmaker for much of her 20s. It took her some time to get into filmmaking, but she sees similarities between the two disciplines.
The artist’s approach showed on “A Promise,” a recent spot for Bob Evans, a Midwest restaurant chain, done through Chicago Creative Partnership.
“We were on a farm outside of Columbus, Ohio,” she explains. “By studying and observing the farm and the details of this place and working with this really great actor, I was able to construct something that everyone really thought had a visceral appeal. It came from being able to absorb it, a simple farm landscape. I shot a lot of stuff outside the board and they were so patient and gracious about it. I think it over-delivered on many levels and everybody was impressed. It’s great when I can be inspired and the agency and client can be inspired also.”
The journey from artist to director began with loneliness. “I was in a studio by myself,” she says. “From there I went into commercial photography. I had big crews and big shoots in all crazy parts of the world. I mostly did retail stuff and catalog work. I started bringing cinematographers onto my shoots and became self-taught as far as filmmaking. I think it’s the thing that challenges my mind creatively the most.”
Before signing with MacGuffin, Wingert ran her own production company, Mineral, from her hometown of Seattle. “It was outside the agency and spot world,” she says. “I would pitch my own ideas. I was like a creative director and a director, doing things that were more like two-minute films that were branding pieces.”
At MacGuffin Wingert has compiled a reel of big, cinematic spots for clients such as Pfizer, Ford and Chrysler, and last year she completed Stray, a short film that has made the festival circuit.
Wingert acknowledges that the film is the opening gambit for a movie. “I’m a commercialmaker,” she says, “but I have aspirations to make a feature film as well. Stray is a nice example of where my work is headed. I’d love to do a subtle character piece that is essentially a love story. I’ve got some different pieces of material I’m working on.”
Her artistic style shows on spots like “Crossfire” for Chrysler and BBDO Detroit. “The creatives had a big vision for it and I think I brought a different approach. I love the spot because I think it has this beautiful texture and some beauty to it. I try to challenge myself, so I want to go after that kind of work, car work and stuff that is trickier to get,” she says.
“I’m most interested in commercials where there is a sensory experience involved. That can involve creative concepts where picture, sound and concept all completely interlock into one tight thing. That’s what I’m always striving to do. I would like to do more dialogue-driven and character-driven spots because when you work with really great actors, it brings another level to the piece. My work will always be beautiful and poetic because that’s what I’m really into. When you add a great actor to it, it makes it really supercharged.”
