boy, a photographer, two script writers, a production designer, an MTV promo guy, a set designer, and the hopeful Art Center grad. These are the origins of our seven up-and-coming directors who are trying to create something memorable, dont want to be pigeon-holed and only have their friends to thank for giving them what they needed on the road to signing. Whether they went to art school, sold a script or have an Aunt Mary in the business, theyve all taken different approaches to achieve the same thing-shooting great spots.
New director Marc Bennett at Los Angeles-based Reactor Films says it best: When youre a doctor you go to school, do your internship, residency and boom, youre a doctor. But with filmmaking, theres no set way to go about it. You just create it on your own.
Brendan Donovan
Last summer Brendan Donovan made his directorial debut with two spots for Brattleboro, Vt.-based retailer Meridian Music. The spots, Pencil Sharpener, and Car Boy via Christy MacDougall Mitchell, New York, demonstrated a unique humor (a man sharpens pencils to match the size of his penis) and attracted the attention of New York-based Compulsive Pictures, who provided production on the spots. Immediately after wrapping the project, Compulsive signed Donovan for U.S. spot representation. Since then, the bespectacled bloke from New Zealand has completed two more projects and is in pre-production on a third. In his words, Its starting to happen.
His secret to success: Have a lot of friends willing to do you a favor and above all, willing to do it free. His background as an agency creative director at Cliff Freeman & Partners, New York, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, New York, and later as a freelance art director opened many doors for Donovan when it came time to get a reel together. He expects that one day soon he wont have to worry about whittling down the budget, but for now hes taking an any-means-necessary approach to reel building.
For quality-control purposes (no tampon spots please!) Donovan has been writing his own commercials and knocking on doors to shape his reel for diversity. With the support of New York-based agency DiMassimo, Donovan recently set out to convince manufacturers of Lotus Sports Cars to fund a first-ever commercial spot for the U.S. market. At first they were like, we only sell 125 cars in the U.S. a year, we cant afford to advertise, related Donovan. He sold the idea anyway. The :30 spot titled The Realization, was shot under the Compulsive banner and is due to air nationally during select programming such as golf and driving tournaments.
As a director, Donovan benefits from his acute understanding of design and advertising. He started in 92 as a creative unit manager at Van de Roer Design, Wellington, New Zealand, and then opened his own Wellington-based communications consulting firm, Donovan Elwin, where he was a creative director/partner. A year later Donovan sold his half of the partnership and moved to the States.
His ambition to explore different genres continues with three more projects in different stages of development. He recently completed a three-spot campaign for New Jersey-based Meadowlands Racetrack via dKb and Partners, Morristown, N.J. Hes in pre-pro on a promo for the Newport International Film Festival and a ballsy PSA for Citizens For A Smoke-Free America based on a print campaign that contends smoking shrinks your dick, tagged If the tobacco companies can lie, so can we.
Jay P. Morgan
Morgan considers himself a cartoonist trapped in a photographers body. Hes spent the bulk of his career photographing staged absurdities for commercial clients at his Los Angeles-based Jay P. Morgan Studios. A couple of years ago, he started a photocomic series that ultimately wound up in bound book form called The Slanted Lens. The book features a series of ridiculous frozen moments in time where an everyday situation has gone wildly out of control. For instance, a haggard housewife will be holding a roll of duct tape while everything in the house, including her husband and the cat, have been taped to the living room wall. The caption reads, Its that time of the month again.
About a year ago, The Slanted Lens caught the eye of Beta Films at a trade show and Beta subsequently commissioned Morgan to film 10, one-minute shorts based on his work in the book. The pictures are begging to move so I just brought them to life, says Morgan who wrote and directed 10 absurd, comedic vignettes, which aired on television in Europe.
Although Morgan was satisfied with his photography career he thought that the time was right to start commercial directing. He put The Slanted Lens on a commercial reel and began shopping it around. At the time, Beverly Hills-based Shadowrock executive producer Herb Schwartz was looking to launch a satellite shop for up-and-coming film directors. Immediately drawn in by Morgans humor, Schwartz signed him as the first director at Shadowrocks new division, Film Neutron.
Since joining Film Neutron, Morgan has directed Interrogation Room, promoting Game. com Pocket Pro video game Resident Evil 2 via New York-based Posnick & Kolker. The same agency hired him again to direct two more spots, Oh Waiter, for Tiger Toys Classic Concentration pocket video game and Burglars, for Tiger Toys Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy hand-held video games. All the spots hes directed so far have the inherent silliness represented in his photography where the characters all look like theyre filmed through a warped fun house mirror.
Speck.Gordon
Will Speck and Josh Gordon write together, direct together, heck, they probably even bathe together, but kidding aside, their unique collaboration has produced some great creative work in a very short time. Now with their recent signing at bicoastal @radical.media and an Academy Award nomination for their short film Culture, its safe to say that this director duo is more up than coming.
I think the greatest thing about working as a team is youre not alone and you have somebody that you can trust and bounce ideas off of, says Speck. The other thing, adds Gordon, is if there is ever a snag, its always the other persons fault.
Speck and Gordon met at NYU Film School and moved out to Los Angeles after graduation to set up some projects. Gordon got a job on the writing staff of television series Mad About You, and Speck started working as a creative executive with producer Laura Ziskin (now president of FOX 2000 Pictures) on the movie To Die For. It only took a year of enduring office life to get the team get back into writing scripts together.
They left their respective jobs and wrote the short film Angry Boy for FXM Shorts, a division of the FX Network, which produces short films. The five-minute short features a guy who goes through a series of situations where everyone drives him absolutely mad. Immediately after Angry Boy, the team wrote Culture, a 30-minute short film based on their collective office experiences. As Gordon put it, It was a manifestation of our passive aggressive fantasies about office angst. Our revenge film.
Culture is about a young go-getter played by Greg Germann who, when promoted to the coveted position of Jr. Culture Editor at a newspaper, watches all his corporate ambitions spiral down the tube as his old hag secretary played by Florence Stanley sabotages him. All the actors signed on to the project for no pay and it was produced by freelance music video/ commercial producer Krista Montagna, who ultimately brought Speck and Gordon to @radical.media.
I think the thing that attracted us to both commercials and film is that film is such a long development process and commercials are in and out and great creative that gives us an opportunity to flex our muscles and get us on sets, related Speck.
Speck.Gordons first commercial job at @radical.media was a package of two humor-based spots, Death Bed and Church, for auctionuniverse.com via New York-based The Romann Group. In Church, a man in a confession booth admits to the priest that he sold his wedding band for a 1956 Mickey Mantle baseball card. To the confessors surprise, the priest offers the guy $70 for the card. A woman waiting outside the confessional antes up $100 while an alter boy chimes in with $200. The voiceover: This happens on auctionuniverse.com 24 hours a day.
Right now were comedy dialogue guys, but we see ourselves in the near future branching out into learning about effects and the combination of the two excites us a lot, says Speck.
Steve Suchman
Id like to do work that is so visually potent that it lingers with you for days, says Suchman. That was what Suchman had in mind when he set out to create three spec spots for his reel, which were so varied and sophisticated that they caught the attention of bicoastal Coppos Films, where Suchman recently signed. Coppos executive producers Allison Nunn and Bill Bratkowski only had one thing to say: Are you sure these are spec spots?
Suchmans reel represents his collective experiences as a student of architecture, production designer and owner of his own company, Steve Suchman Design (now defunct). But Suchman says it was his collaboration with bicoastal/international The Artists Company and then rep Susan Neill that put the idea in his head to direct. I think I have always been passionate about film and I figured thats where Ill probably get my most full expression as a creator, explains Suchman.
It took Suchman two and a half years to complete his reel which consists of Poker Nights, College Fund, and Yangki in the Haight which he produced, directed and funded himself. Suchman tapped all his previously formed relationships for his cause and worked tirelessly to keep people enrolled in the project. I would just go to people and say, ALook, I have a really unreasonable request, says Suchman.
Each spot on the reel represents a different style conceptually and visually, but Poker Nights, a Motorola spot, is the most stunning of the three. The heavily-effects driven, :74 spot features Seymour Cassel playing poker with some friends in a futuristic, StarTrek-like setting. The guys banter back and forth about technology the way guys carry on about sports. Just as Cassel wins the hand his wristwatch, a computer-generated liquid face, informs him that its time to go. The other players dematerialize and we realize that the card game was taking place in a virtual setting.
College Fund, was created with producer Henry Lu of Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., for the Canadian College Fund. The black and white spot tells the true story of a student who lives in a van to help pay for his education. The third is an AT&T ad about a small San Francisco-based wallpaper company called Yangki in the Haight shot in a contemporary, documentary style and tells how the small business is able to operate globally.
Ive been lucky because I have worked as a production designer on a wide range of commercial types and styles and I find all of it engaging so I would say that my strength is diversity and Im prepared to take on anything, concludes Suchman.
Tim Abshire
I think it all started in 1983 when I got a video camera for my eighth grade graduation, says director Tim Abshire. Ever since then its just been video, video, video. Based on that statement, one might say that Abshires recent signing with bicoastal Shelter Films was nothing less than manifest destiny.
During his senior year at Western Illinois University, McComb, Ill., where he was studying communications and broadcasting, Abshire won a film contest sponsored by the National Association of College Broadcasters where the first prize was a paid summer internship at MTV. At the end of the internship, Abshire and the other interns did a final presentation that resulted in an offer for a full-time position. He turned it down. At the time I was really into learning editing so I went back to Chicago, took an Avid class and after a month I say to myself, AWhat, am I crazy?! explains Abshire.
After a modest amount of nagging from Abshire, MTV asked him back for a six-month trial period that turned into six years. Abshire directed comedic promos for Beavis and Butthead, MTV Spring Break and then the more high profile promos for the MTV Video Music Awards in 97 featuring Chris Rock, and again in 98 with Ben Stiller. What amazed me about my experience at MTV was how much people were willing to help me learn because I was into it, says Abshire.
About a year ago Abshire started to hear the commercial buzz from friends in the business, but decided to wait. Then one day he received a phone call from Shelter Films executive producer Steve Shore that went something like this: Tim Abshire, ever think about a career in commercials? I hear its quite lucrative. The rest is, as they say, history.
Abshire has just completed his first project since finding Shelter a couple of months ago. Bathtub, BBQ and Rocket created for Eidos Interactives video game Soul Reaver via Winkler Advertising, San Francisco, feature ordinary people doing really stupid, life-threatening things. Shot like a home video, BBQ shows the grill-helmer demonstrating for the camera how you douse the coals with tons of lighter fluid. The man is about to drop a lit match into the grill when the video pauses and the voiceover snorts, What a moron! But at least he got to keep his soul. Cut to the video game where the characters not only die, but they lose their souls. Abshire is also in the process of shooting a commercial for the Sony PlayStation game, Gex 3, also via Winkler Advertising.
Marc Bennett
On the road to becoming a director, Brooklyn native Marc Bennett attended five art schools and never graduated from any of them. Hes not stupid; he just wanted to learn everything and learn it well.
A lot of these schools specialized and you werent allowed to mix, for example, fine arts with communication arts, but to be good at either of them, you need to know both, says Bennett, who has studied painting, fine arts, communication arts, photography, set design and filmmaking. Hes finding that his piecemeal education is serving him well. In January 99, bicoastal Reactor Films executive producer Oliver Fuselier signed him, and already he has directed the spot Love for Ameritech via Ammirati Puris Lintas, Chicago.
Bennett officially started his career as a set designer for off-Broadway productions, but after a couple of years in the theater world, he started to take keen notice of all the bright lights and billboards in the Times Square area. His growing interest in advertising led him to take an art directors position at New York-based Levy Austin Advertising, where he worked on print campaigns for fashion and entertainment clients.
After visiting a friend in L.A., Bennett decided to move to the West Coast where he opened up a small advertising boutique called Marc Bennett Studios (which later became Bennett/ Novak and Company when he collaborated with writer Robert Novak) which specialized in print advertising for entertainment, film and music clients.
During this time, Bennett independently completed a series of short film projects including Mothers Day and From Fairfax with Love, and was hired to direct a documentary about female cancer survivors for PBS titled Life Matters, A Journey of Hope and Survival. After a total of eight years in print advertising, Bennett sold his half of the company to Novak and decided to pursue directing full-time.
Bennett completed two humorous spec spots, thanks, he says, to countless friends in the business: Itsy Bitsy Spider for Baby GAP and How Ya Doin? for The New York Times. On the strength of these two efforts he was awarded his first real commercial gig directing Graffiti and Dog for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts retrospective of artist Keith Harings work. The spots (via Foote Cone & Belding, San Francisco) feature Haring as a young boy in 66 back in his hometown of Kutztown, Pa. drawing his unique form of art all over the walls, and even on a dog. The campaign won a Bronze World Medal at The New York Festivals 41st Annual Television Advertising Awards earlier this year.
Marcel Langenegger
When Marcel Langenegger graduated last year from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, production companies were tripping over themselves to sign him, but bicoastal/international Propaganda Films won the race.
A Switzerland native and undergraduate of Art Center, Geneva (now defunct), Langenegger came to the States after being awarded one of two slots at Art Center, Pasadenas masters program in film. Langenegger chose to defer to open his own design shop in Zurich, but three years later phoned up Art Center and found out that the offer was still good.
Colin Hickson, VP of Propaganda Commercials, says that Langeneggers masters program reel-which consists of highly stylized spec spots for Chanel No. 5, Nike and Perrier-is reminiscent of work by Mark Romanek and David Fincher. Its the most exciting reel to come out of Art Center since the likes of Michael Bay and Tarsem, claims Hickson.
Since joining Propaganda, Langenegger has shot one commercial for Cardinal Beer, Heaven and Hell via Young & Rubicam, Zurich, in which a guy smuggles a beer into heaven. After taking a sip he goes straight to hell where there is a big party going on. Meanwhile, back in heaven, a boring place, the residents find the beer bottle and use it as a periscope to peep on hell.
I think commercials should stick with you a little bit so you dont forget them after 30 seconds, either emotionally or visually, and they should certainly always entertain, relates Langenegger, who says he leans towards scripts that are visually interesting and artistic.
Langenegger has also just directed new music videos for Khaleel titled No Mercy, and Furslide, Love Song.
Building directors careers [involves] making some very smart and intelligent choices which means we dont shoot every board that comes in the door, says Hickson, who mentions that he has three U.S. commercials in the works for Langenegger including an anti-drug PSA. What weve been doing with Marcel is meeting lots of people, getting the reel out there, keeping his creative juices flowing by shooting some music videos.
Things have been great, says Langenegger about his whirlwind career. Its been like a rush. I just got a cell phone.u
