By Christine Champagne

A native of Denmark, Nicolai Fuglsig knew absolutely nothing about baseball when he was hired to direct a new baseball-centric campaign for Fox Sports Net of out TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, that includes this issue’s Top Spot of the Week, “Signs” (:30).

    Given Fuglsig’s lack of knowledge about the sport, the client was nervous about the agency’s choice to award the job to the director, who is represented for spot work through bicoastal Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ), according to TBWA creative director/North America Chuck McBride, who noted with a laugh, “I pulled my trust card on this one.”

Certainly, Fuglsig came highly recommended. McBride noted that MJZ director Spike Jonze and MJZ executive producer Vincent Landay suggested he let the Dane take a swing at the campaign.

And, ultimately, Fuglsig knocked it out of the park for TBWA and its client. “Signs” cleverly depicts city-dwelling baseball fans taking part in a covert operation in which they spot the sign being flashed from a catcher on the opposing team to his pitcher, then pass that sign along through a network of fans until it gets back to the batter, who therefore knows a curveball is coming and is able to adjust his swing accordingly.

 

ROOKIE PLAYER

While the classic American game was foreign to Fuglsig, McBride noted that the director immediately got the gist of what “Signs” was all about. “He understands sports enough to know that there is code in sport that can manifest itself it real-life environments and be pretty interesting to watch,” McBride said.

Fuglsig and DP Max Malkin shot “Signs” in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles in one day. “Max is a great DP for sure, but I don’t know if he was quite ready for the Danish running and gunning guerilla style of shooting,” Fuglsig said laughing.

The director literally had his crew dashing from location to location–filming on 16mm with three cameras equipped with long lenses, allowing them to shoot from a distance, giving the spot a covert, spy-movie look.

Meanwhile, Fuglsig created situations in which the fans could subtly pass along the sign. “I didn’t want the people pointing finger signs and being obvious,” Fuglsig shared. “I wanted it to look like this was something that could actually happen. So we tried to put the signs into more subtle situations like the man delivering the package and giving the sign, and the woman bending down and tying her shoelaces and giving the sign, and the painter drawing the sign.”

 

TEAM SPIRIT

As for the thinking behind “Signs,” McBride said the aim of the spot is to create a feeling among baseball fans “that we’re all in this together. Fox Sports Network is not like a national network where they play one game for the entire nation. They take regional sports games and broadcast those games to [the corresponding region], so in L.A. they show all the Dodgers games. In San Francisco, they show all the Giants games.”

To reach all of Fox Sports Nets viewers, who are scattered across various markets, multiple, customized versions of “Signs”–as well as the two other spots in the campaign–were shot, featuring the main actor in the opening and closing scene wearing various team jerseys and caps. For example, the version of “Signs” you can view here has the fan wearing Seattle Mariners gear.

McBride noted that while some directors would have found the additional work daunting and taken a pass on the campaign, Fuglsig was a good sport about it. “What I liked about Nicolai was he came in with this attitude of, What do I have to do to make this thing work? And right then, I knew it was going to be good because he was excited, he was enthusiastic, he had a great eye,” McBride related, “and so as long as we were going to set the spots up in a similar way in our heads, I couldn’t really go wrong.”

“Signs” was edited by Adam Pertofsky of Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, with music composed by Los Angeles-based Endless Noise’s creative director/composer Jeff Elmassian.

Incidentally, one can’t accuse Fuglsig of not being a team player. According to the director, he didn’t make any money from directing the low-budget Fox Sports Net campaign because he funneled his earnings into the spot, spending it on additional cameras.

    For Fuglsig, the monetary sacrifice was worth it. “This could be an entry for me into the scene of subtle comedy. My reel is very dark and quirky, you know, but I can do other stuff,” Fuglsig said, noting, “I loved the observational subtleties of the comedy [in “Signs” and this campaign in general], and this was a great opportunity not to do a gag but to something funny that feels real.”

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