In some respects it wasn’t the live event itself that mattered first and foremost but rather the fact that the work which is the centerpiece of Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Directors Showcase will have a life well beyond its June 25th premiere at the Cannes Lions International Film Festival.
Saatchi has set up a YouTube channel through which visitors can access the work at their convenience, thus giving this year’s crop of new directors an enduring exposure which can help further their careers.
The YouTube channel first showed the work concurrent with Saatchi’s event at Cannes, accompanied by agency Tweets which added some color and insights.
Now visitors can log onto www.youtube.com/user/NDS and get a look-see at a field of 23 directors in the ’09 Showcase–16 individual helmers and seven teams.
And over the next year Saatchi plans to add work from past Showcases to the channel, thus providing the industry with historical context and a kind of time capsule as the work of emerging directors reflects the tenor of the times in the industry. According to Tom Eslinger, Saatchi’s worldwide creative director of interactive, the agency hopes to have all or most of the 19 years of New Directors Showcase work online by the time of the 2010 Showcase premiere in Cannes.
Eslinger added that aspiring directors can send their work to Saatchi through a YouTube link for consideration for New Directors Showcase inclusion in 2010. “We’ll potentially be getting in work for a full year and filtering through it rather than just for a few months leading up to the event,” said Eslinger, noting that this should make for ultimately a stronger Showcase with likely more work up for consideration and more time for Saatchi folks to comment and compare notes on what they see during the course of a year. Saatchi of course will continue to seek out work on its own to discover Showcase-worthy talent.
That hunt for directorial talent had a more pronounced online dynamic for the ’09 Showcase than in years past, said Richard Myers, creative director, global culture, for Saatchi. “We’ve been trolling worthwhile video sites for a couple of years but it’s worth saying that our embracing of online has grown this year.”
Eslinger said that Saatchi has sought out relevant social networking places and quality video sites–including, for example, the Aniboom site for animation–to tap into work and directors for Showcase consideration. “We still go through production companies and other conventional channels but the online component is also proving of value,” related Eslinger. “Online channels are becoming sort of art house cinemas, and we think that as our New Directors Showcase YouTube channel develops, it will represent a significant arthouse for work and talent.”
Increase in Showcase helmers The 23 directors (with the agency counting teams as individual entrants) in the ’09 Showcase represent an increase over the 19 directors last year and the 18 in ’07.
“We have never seen the Showcase as a must-get-to-a-certain-number game,” said Myers. “We never try to fill out the Showcase. We just go with the directors we feel are the most deserving. My own personal view about why the number went up this year is simply that there’s a lot of talent out there which is reassuring and refreshing in a way. We are seeing great creative and originality in the work. And we seem to have turned the dire corner when it comes to music videos and pop promos.”
On the music video front, Myers observed, “It seems to go in cycles. Years ago videos represented a great creative opportunity for directors to start out and make names for themselves, but then that became less the case as many videos turned less original and more a case of a band on camera performing a track. Now, though, we’re seeing extraordinarily creative ideas coming back into promos. These new opportunities for new directors to demonstrate their abilities kind of offset the fact that the same opportunities in commercials are becoming fewer and farther between. It seems there is a disappointing lack of new directors shooting commercials. Many top name directors are more available than they once were and human nature suggests that clients and creative teams jump at the chance to work with established, more famous and proven directors, sometimes excluding new untried talent.”
A prime example of a director scoring in the Showcase with a music video is James Frost for Radiohead’s “House of Cards” “It’s the first video created without cameras or lights,” said Myers. “A laser scanner picks up 3D imagery that is then translated into film. The effect is amazing.” Frost is with Zoo Film, Hollywood, Calif.
Myers also cited director Danakil of France’s Wanda Productions for Poni Hoax’s “Anti-bodies” music video. “It’s a very traditional piece of filmmaking but at the same time it’s very evocative and provocative, addressing a difficult subject matter–abortion–but handling it incredibly counter to that,” assessed Myers. “It’s very artistic.”
Eslinger concurred, observing, “The video is beautifully art directed with some individual frames looking like art posters you’d put up on a wall.”
Other Showcase directors whose strong showings centered on music video work included: Benjamin Steiger Levine (who’s with Nu Films/Les Enfants, Montreal, and aWHITELABELproduct’s L.A.-based visual media content creation company Continuum Content) for his Beast clip “Mr. Hurricane” (in which bees converge and personify into a dancing “Mr. Hurricane”); the helming collective Megaforce (repped by El Nino, Paris), which describes its style as “Paris meets Brooklyn,” for the “Live Good” clip featuring Naive New Beaters; Nick Hooker of Rabbit, New York, for the Grace Jones video “Corporate Cannibal”; Corin Hardy of Academy Films, London, for a stop motion/puppetry tour de force titled “Warrior’s Dance,” in which to the beat of Prodigy we see cigarette packet characters raiding a bar and showing a penchant for pyromania; the team of Oren Lavie, Yuval and Merav Nathan (handled by Sonic Management, Marina del Rey, Calif.) for Lavie’s “Her Morning Elegance”; Dennis Liu of bicoastal/international @radical.media for the Apple Mac-featured music video featuring the Bird and The Bee tune “Again and Again”; Laurie Thinot of bicoastal/international Partizan for autoKratz’s “Stay The Same”; and Eran Creevy for Sonny J’s “Hands Free,” a clip produced by Between The Eyes, London, and Sleeper Films, Santa Monica, featuring tongue-in-cheek zombie line dancing. Creevy is with the U.K. shop Between The Eyes.
Spot Successes
While he said that commercials were less prevalent this year in the Showcase mix, Myers noted that spotwork still drew Saatchi to several directors. Myers cited spots directed by Federico Garcia of Pank Films, Buenos Aires; the helming duo of Irina Dakeva and Clement Dozier from WIZZdesign, Paris; Siri from London shop Knucklehead; and Zhu Jin Jing of JQK production in Beijing.
The latter directed what Myers described as “simply amazing footage of a martial artist playing table tennis with nun-chuks instead of a paddle, winning points repeatedly against his opponents. It was a fantastic piece of performance. The way it’s directed is kind of sympathetic to the player.” Titled “Power,” the spot was for Nokia.
Garcia directed “Women Who Aren’t There,” a spot for a shopping mall in Argentina which shows men as being incapable of accomplishing much of anything without the help of a woman. Each male ends up in a mundane predicament and ends up calling out in desperation for help from his wife/mate–however, they’re all shopping at the Alto Palermo mall.
Dakeva and Dozier helmed Scrabble’s “Sumo,” which Myers described as “a different brand of thoughtful animation,” ultimately bringing to life a Scrabble game board.
And Siri directed a U.K. Channel 4 promo spot for a series showcasing the work of famed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Titled “Kubrick,” the promo is a single track shot through various clues and hints in a studio and behind the scenes related to Kubrick movies.
There was also a viral spot, “Break Up Service,” that earned Saatchi Showcase distinction for director Kosai Sekine of Japan, who’s repped by Blink, London. The viral tells the story of a guy who runs a break-up service, traveling around Tokyo on behalf of his clients, telling their lovers and partners that their relationships are over. “The economy of shooting, the edit is just brilliant. There isn’t a single wasted frame,” said Myers.
And a poignantly disturbing animation PSA showing the cycle of violence and destruction on a treadmill, more like the tread of a battle tank, garnered a Showcase slot for directors Philippe Gamer and Fred Remuzat, a.k.a. The Consortium (for the Falsification of Reality), who work out of Gamer’s French animation studio Space Patrol. In the PSA, titled “Stop Pain” for Pain Without Borders out of TBWAMAP, Paris, a boy sees his ill mom fall and die on the side of a road. He continues to walk through a devastated town, witnessing explosions and destruction. He tries to escape the war torn area but to no avail. The pattern of destruction and suffering repeats itself, including the lad walking to again and again see his mom laying motionless on the ground.
Antonio Balseiro directed a timelapse live action piece in which animated game figures–who look like they’re constructed from Post-It notes–run through a town and various backdrops, promoting “The Human Race 10K” for Nikeplus.com via agency BBDO Argentina. Balseiro’s company affiliation is Gazz, Buenos Aires. The Nike spot is entitled “Post It.”
Meanwhile a series of IDs for the Cult TV network earned the Amsterdam directing team of Andre Maat and Henk Loorbach (a.k.a. Andre Maat and Superelectric) inclusion in the Showcase. Maat and Superelectric recently signed with Lost Highway Films, New York, for stateside representation, and are handled by Stink in Germany.
Shorts, other fare
Aaron Duffy of 1st Ave. Machine, New York, directed a live-action, stop motion short film, Special Guest, which caught Myers’ eye. Myers quipped that the offbeat short led Duffy to describe himself as “a director/crochet artist.”
Director Keith Loutit’s Bathtub IV short features time-lapse photography and miniatures ranging from people figurines to a copter. Director Loutit is a Sydney-based artisan who recently signed with Partizan, London.
The directing team Dvein–Fernando Dominguez, Teo Guillem and Carlos Pardo–gained Showcase status via its motion/graphics/design/live-action film serving as an open for the 2006 OFFF Festival (International Festival for the Post-Digital Creative Culture) in Barcelona. Dvein is handled by Blacklist, New York.
While sophisticated animation marked a number of the Showcase projects, the Christopher Hutsul-directed Nike/Resfest viral short stood out because it “was the antithesis of Pixar,” said Myers. The rough hewn animation in Hutsul’s piece–Rodney and Geoffrey Visit Air Force One–has “a naivete that is endearing,” Myers observed. Hutsul is handled by Toronto-based production house Soft Citizen.
And rounding out the ’09 Saatchi New Directors Showcase field are Roman Kaelin and Florian Wittmann, two film school students (Filmadkademie Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany), on the strength of their short film titled Formic, featuring CGI and ultra slow motion.
