By Bill Dunlap

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.

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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.”

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