Former Mother creative scores as a filmmaker.
By Robert Goldrich
Born in Australia, Kim Gehrig moved to London to study graphic design at Central St Martins for what was supposed to be a three-month stretch. Twelve years later, she’s still in the U.K., having landed right out of school a creative role at ad agency Mother in London and establishing herself there before settling into the director’s chair.
Though she is new to spot directing, it doesn’t quite fit to call her a new director. Gehrig enjoyed an eight-year tenure at Mother, as a creative and creative director on lauded work. For the past two-and-a-half years she diversified into directing while with Mother, directing music videos via Academy Films, London.
Late last year she formally exited Mother to focus full time on directing, securing her first “commercial,” a branding short for Amnesty International out of Mother that put her on the map as a helmer in a major way. Gehrig not only directed the Academy-produced Amnesty piece, titled You Are Powerful, but also contributed to it as a writer working in concert with her former Mother colleagues.
The 90-second film opens on a young African American man who smiles confidently into the camera after setting his bicycle aside. Then in what seems a world away we see news footage of a man who is about to be lynched. Suddenly the African-American enters the scene and lifts the noose off the intended victim’s neck, saving his life.
Next an elderly woman intervenes, single-handedly holding back a line of militia who had been beating demonstrators in the streets. To see this gray-haired, rather frail looking woman stop the violence is a most inspiring sight.
A middle-aged man then comes to the rescue in yet another broadcast news footage scenario, untying a prisoner’s hands and removing his blindfold.
Then another man leaves his world to free people from a dark prison cell.
A pregnant woman exits the safety of her home to stop the beating of an innocent man halfway around the world.
Next a woman in a business suit performs the heroic feet of standing between a firing squad and its target, preventing a foreign government-sponsored execution.
And finally a gal in jogger’s sweats ends her workout in a lovely neighborhood park to go to far more dangerous turf where she takes a semiautomatic weapon away from a child. This after we see assorted scenes of children being armed and deployed as soldiers.
The camera returns to this last heroine, at which time we see a supered message that simply reads, “You Are Powerful.”
Marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, You Are Powerful is being screened in movie theaters across the U.K. All the action in the short unfolds to the moving accompaniment of the song “Until the Day is Done,” donated by REM.
The piece serves as a powerful, poignant branding and fundraising film for Amnesty International.
You Are Powerful deployed the talents of visual effects/postproduction houses Smoke & Mirrors, New York and London, Framestore, London, and Rushes, London.
Collaboration among the houses was paramount as the central idea relied heavily on post, compositing hero characters into news footage so they appear to interact with the events. Fifty days of post work wre required but only 11 days were avaailable.
Sean Broughton, Smoke & Mirrors’ creative director in New York, related, “This [project] was an opportunity to do some real good, so pulling out all the stops was the only way to go…Understanding exactly how she [Gehrig] wanted each shot to feel, as well as work technically, was very important. She shot everything we needed perfectly to make the shots work as well as they did…while capturing the right emotional vibe.”
Ed Sayer, who served as Mother’s producer on the job, said, “There are many ways to approach any post task and in this case we gained the eclectic opinions of all this top worldwide post talent and when anyone talked, everyone listened. So the film received the benefit of all that experience and the joy of all that talent. It couldn’t have been done in the time without this total and ego-less cooperation.”
Depicting everyday people briefly leaving their comfortable environments, entering scenes of violence and then helping to stop the atrocities, You Are Powerful went on to earn an online ThinkBox Award.
Channeling Speaking of thinking outside the box, Gehrig’s next directorial gig debuted as a one-time broadcast event on Saturday, Feb. 28, in the U.K., with a story spanning three 60-second spots spilling over from one U.K. TV channel to the next.
The sequential spots for travel website lastminute.com out of London agency Karmarama are humorous and whimsical with the first spot having debuted at 9:50 p.m. on ITV. Viewers were then encouraged to change over to Channel 4 at 9:51 p.m. for the second spot to continue the story and then to Channel 5 at 9:52 p.m. for the final :60 installment. The action in the :60s is akin to an audience wave en masse in a sports stadium–except it’s characterized as a “Mexican Thumb Wave” and the scope goes way beyond any single venue.
“In many respects, it’s like a travelogue of people from and in different parts of the world with the sequences cleverly connected,” observed Gehrig. “The feel is one of home movie-like, user-generated content.”
While this mini-campaign is dramatically different in tone from the seriousness of the Amnesty short, there’s an inspiring vibe to both of Gehrig’s first spot directing endeavors. She related, “The Amnesty piece was created not to guilt trip people but to inspire them by making them feel good about their power to make a difference. There’s also a feel-good charm to lastminute.com.”
A bit of whimsy is also evident in Gehrig’s most recent music video, Wiley’s “Cash In My Pocket,” in which bankers–generally vilified in light of a harsh, bailout-littered economic climate–are put in more of a silly, joyful light, with lyrics like “all I really want is money in my pocket.” The video plays intentionally amateurish, as if a bunch of bankers made it.
Yet there’s nothing amateur about Gehrig’s approach to directing. She gravitated towards Academy Films as her production house roost based on its penchant for what she characterized as “classical filmmaking” and a long-time admiration for the work and creative sensibilities of director Jonathan Glazer.
“When you look around for a production company, you want to be at a place that makes the work you would like to make,” explained Gehrig whose directorial vision has also been shaped by her experience on the agency side which spans acclaimed work over the years for such clients as Schweppes, Brit-art, Coca-Cola and Motorola.
“The lessons learned at Mother have helped me as a director,” said Gehrig. “The most important lesson for me was the importance of the idea. I love ideas, being able to spot an idea and communicate an idea are two of the biggest strengths I gleaned at Mother. The intellectual rigor of and around an idea is what I take with me and hold close to my creative heart.”
Gehrig hopes this “heart” will know no geographic bounds. As she continues to seek challenging European projects via Academy Films, the London house has entered into a reciprocal representation relationship with bicoastal Park Pictures, giving Gehrig a stateside home if the proper American work emerges.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More