Director Bruce Nadel’s son was home on spring break a few weeks ago and dropped by bicoastal One Such Films, where his father’s New York studio is based. After watching his father labor over a tabletop shoot for a few hours, the boy said in a bored voice, "So. You do this everyday, huh?"
"It wasn’t, ‘Wow! You do this everyday!’ " laughs Nadel, a 20-year tabletop vet. While he can chuckle about his son’s blase attitude, Nadel says that the incident made him realize something. "Tabletop," he says, "is so unglamorous."
That lack of glamour is having an unfortunate impact on the tabletop world. "There are very few up-and-comers," Nadel says. "In every other aspect of the business, in every other directorial venue, there are young guys, coming up. A whole wave of young people. With tabletop, it’s not so. That’s so fascinating for me."
With or without new tabletoppers, Nadel is quick to assert that there will always be a demand for tabletop. "There’s just a simplicity in tabletop that will never be replaced," he says. "You can write a lot of clever copy about food, and you can have a lot of clever ideas. But food photographed beautifully or doing interesting things … That’s a very hard thing to surpass."
Case in point: Nadel’s recent Black Angus Steak House spot "Prime" (via Goldberg Moser O’Neill, San Francisco) which features a close-up of a huge knife sawing slowly through a slab of juicy prime rib. It’s enough to make a vegetarian salivate.
Even without a future generation of tabletoppers, Nadel still views things optimistically. He speculates that there will be even more tabletop work in the future. "My fantasy is that you’ll be able to turn on something like the food channel, and TV will be so interactive with high definition and broadband technology that you’ll be able to see a food commercial like the [Black Angus] spot and think, ‘Wow, I’m hungry.’ Then you can access a database that’s going to have all sorts of food footage. … A tremendous volume of material is going to be needed."
Last fall Nadel broke new ground when he convinced agency Hoffman York in Milwaukee to commission both a standard and experimental high-definition version of a regional Sprint spot "How Was Your Day?" (SHOOT’s DTV & Advertising Supplement, 10/30/98, p. 8). But despite the high profile of the spot, Nadel says the HD market has yet to take off. "I’m having the damndest time getting clients to go with this HD thing," he says. Even the Sprint spot, he adds, has yet to open any new doors for him.
Despite this, Nadel says he is currently preparing to do an HDTV spec piece on his own time and money in order to facilitate the transition. "Otherwise it’s just talk," he says. "Agencies and clients can’t embrace it … I’ll do a spec piece in HD-then I’ll have something tangible. And I’ll be able to say, ‘Look at this. Do you like the look of this?’ And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, it’s beautiful film.’ And I’ll say, ‘It’s actually not really film; it’s hi-def.’ Then I’ll see if I get any oohs and ahhs."z
