The crown jewel of many an agency producer’s reel is likely to be a big effects-driven spot with a marquee director and a big postproduction budget that’s quite visible on the screen. And, without a doubt, those producers played key roles in creating that successful high-end work, but conversations with a number of agency producers who have experience on big effects spots reveal that their hands-on roles can vary widely.
Looking back on his experience as producer on the Nike Gridiron spot "Gamebreakers," directed by David Fincher of bicoastal Anonymous Content, with effects by Digital Domain, Venice, Calif., Jeff Selis of Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., reflects concisely and modestly on his contributions: "The next time I do a job like this, specifically with David Fincher, I’m going to get the estimate signed, award the job and then come back for the dub."
What Selis means is that Fincher takes control of his projects. "He plays the role of director, editor, producer and PA," notes Selis, "and it was a glorious experience working with him."
Josh Reynolds, executive producer at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco, agrees with that assessment. He acknowledges that the most important contribution he made on the recent Hewlett-Packard spot "Constant Change" was to hire Fincher to direct. "We knew this was going to be a very challenging concept," says Reynolds. "We needed to find someone who could execute it in a way that we had never seen before. When it came down to it, we said there is only one guy who is right for this job and it’s David. The smartest thing I did was to hire David Fincher. When you work with David, you have to buy into his concept when he presents his ideas to you. If you buy into it, he doesn’t deviate from it. We just had to make sure he stayed on track from a branding point of view and a messaging point of view. David likes to experiment."
A heavy CG spot, "Constant Change" watches an office grow in what appears to be time-lapse photography as an executive walks through the office. There is a cut and a change in wardrobe and lighting every five frames for 24 seconds. Remarkably, almost everything in the spot, including the executive’s clothing, is computer generated. "The challenge was that we were trying to accomplish something that had never been done before," Reynolds relates, "which was shooting a motion control job with the Viper camera that David likes to use—shooting it on green screen at the same time the lighting cycles were changing every five frames to give you a different portion of the day or night. There were so many different elements being built that there was no way you could approve and look at every piece that was going in. That was one of the reasons we trusted David Fincher with this job."
More complex, post-intensive jobs usually mean hiring a big-name director like Fincher, whom Reynolds calls "the ultimate alpha-male," who will tend to dominate the project.
"The higher the status of the director, the more demanding he is going to be about who he wants to work with," says Ben Grylewicz, head of production at W+K. "When I see a creative team and the producer going down the road with a director like Fincher, I always say to them, ‘Understand what you’re getting yourself into. He’s going to want control, demand control, and whether you give it to him or not, he’s going to take it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Do you want a great spot or do you want to be involved?’ "
Balancing Act
The producer’s role doesn’t always take a back seat though. Take, for instance, BBDO New York’s "Spy vs. Spy" spots: "Hallway" and "Helicopter" for Mountain Dew, directed by Traktor via their eponymous company in Santa Monica (the collective also works through bicoastal/international Partizan). Hyatt Choate, executive producer at BBDO, had a full plate when it came to figuring out how to bring the iconic comic strip characters from MAD magazine to life through a mix of live-action photography and digital effects by Method, Santa Monica.
"The hardest thing was to take something that is an icon of a generation and try to make it live," Choate points out. "We tried to be as close to the original comic as we could be. Then there are other things you don’t find in a comic: What do they sound like? What music goes along with them? How do they move? Those were the biggest challenges."
Although the spots appear, at first glance, to be fully CG, they were mostly shot live over a six-day period earlier this year. Stan Winston Studio, Van Nuys, Calif., created the characters’ heads, hats and hands.
"We made twelve different heads with different expressions on them," shares Choate. "In post, with Method, we were able to manipulate those—make mouths and eyes move, and change expressions. We had two women who were about the same height, four feet and change. We had the outfits made for them and they did all the movements. The only things that are CG are their mouths and eyeballs. All the rest—the cars, the helicopters—we shot all that."
Choate, Traktor and the team at Method, which was led by visual effects supervisor Alex Frisch, worked together early in the pre-production process to establish how the characters would look, how the sets would be built and how Method would do the various facial expressions. "[The artists at Method] did tests on movement and we did tests on color and how we were going to shoot things," Choate recalls. "There were a lot of tests that were shot before we got into our real shoot. Between Method, Traktor, ourselves and Stan Winston, we were in constant contact for a month and a half to two months before we shot, just to lay it all out."
A key step for Choate was timing and locking in all the shots. "When we got to the shooting boards, they had every shot—all the angles with all the facial expressions," he says. "Everything had to be laid out to make sure you didn’t miss a piece. Then, through the shoot and two months after, the process was done."
Management Skills
Proof that there is no typical role for an agency producer came to Becky Friedman of BBDO New York when she was tapped to handle the "Colors" campaign for M&M’s. The spots—the multi-hued "River of Chocolate" along with "Red," "Yellow," "Blue" and "Green"—were produced by New York-based Charlex, under the direction of founder/ creative director Alex Weil. Weil himself directed "River of Chocolate"; each of the four other spots drew upon the vision of an artist outside the realm of TV commercials.
"Finding the artists who would be the creatives and work in conjunction with my creatives and Alex, that was a huge challenge and definitely outside our realm of expertise as an ad agency," notes Friedman. "But it was fun and interesting. We would look in The New York Times art section and go to galleries. That led us to all these diverse people."
Nothing about the job was routine, but after the artists, who included the mono-monikered Gelman, were signed on, Friedman’s role became a little more conventional. "Coordinating this job—keeping everything on schedule and on track—was incredibly difficult," she says. "It’s very easy for the creatives here, the creatives at Charlex and the artists involved to all diverge in their viewpoints of what would be best for the spot. It was sort of uncharted territory for all of us. We’d never worked with these kinds of non-advertising people or a concept like this. Making sure that everybody was always together on the same page was a big part of it. And you can’t forget what the client wants."
The project started last August, and the final spot is being finished this month. "It was a super-long process," Friedman reports. "A big challenge for Charlex was that they were developing their technology, dealing with the creatives and creating everything on the fly. Everything was a much longer turnaround than normal because they were creating different technologies to make it happen. Every step of the way it was something no one had ever done before. Technologically, it was an amazing feat."
Friedman, who has been at BBDO for eight years, likes being treated as part of the creative team. "On any job, a producer runs the risk of working with creatives who just want them to get reels and coordinate," she remarks. "I would rather not do projects like that because it’s not as interesting. I hope people appreciate my creative sensibilities."
Making Decisions
Every year, Element 79 Partners, Chicago, does one Gatorade spot that is heavy on visual effects. This year, the spot was "Everywhere," which featured LL Cool J rapping about how Gatorade is ubiquitous, while flat-screen monitors swirl around him, showing people in a variety of activities drinking the sports beverage.
The first challenge for executive producer Cheryl Lindquist was not an unusual one: finding the right director. "The unique and challenging thing about this spot was that the creatives came to me with just a poetry/rap script," Lindquist says. "We wanted LL Cool J and we wanted to get out the message that Gatorade is everywhere. We wanted to create a visual around the poetry and the rap that LL would bring to it. What I had to figure out was do you go to a live-action director or to a music video director or to an effects director?" Lindquist focused on music video directors and went with a concept presented by Paul Hunter of bicoastal HSI Productions.
Hunter shot LL Cool J against a green screen and called on Digital Domain to design the floating monitors that would present the "Everywhere" message. After the shoot, Digital Domain started what would be a two-and-a-half month post process. Finding the footage that would appear on those monitors was a task that fell to Lindquist. "Once we got the track locked in and we had the pre-vis with LL in a rough cut, I was able to find what stock footage scenes would go into it," she recalls. "It was important to find it right away because they needed that footage to work into the screens they were building. I had less than a month to find fifty or sixty stock footage scenes to go into that. It was a huge challenge. It really needed to reflect what LL was talking about—’back lot, parking lot’—really finding interesting visuals that would relate to the copy of the spot."
Digital Domain would provide the agency with visual rough cuts every week, and Lindquist and the creative team would fine-tune them, putting athletes who were under contract to Gatorade in prominent positions and emphasizing product testing scenes shot in Gatorade laboratories.
Working a heavy visual effects spot puts additional pressure on the producer to keep the work on target. "With an effects project, you put so much responsibility into the effects house and making sure that the director stays involved and is really collaborating so you all have the same vision," Friedman explains. "It’s not like film where you can go and find a different take. Once they’ve built these effects, you’re pretty much locked into that. My role is to make sure that we’re keeping the vision, and we’re getting the message across."
Animated Producing
A different kind of director search fell to Kate Talbott, executive producer at Fallon, Minneapolis, for the agency’s latest United Airlines campaign. The four spots in the campaign—"Interview," "Rose," "Lightbulb" and "A Life"—were to be done in artistic, non-CG animation over George Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue."
"There was a thorough search of animation directors, a global search," Talbott shares. "The focus was on trying to find beautiful artistic styles that could also tell a story. We ended up with four boards and each of the four directors we wanted chose a different script. That gave us the message that it was the right person working on the right storyboard."
Three of the artist/directors were from Acme Filmworks, Hollywood. Michael Dudok de Wit helmed "A Life," Joanna Quinn directed "Lightbulb," the team of Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis created "Interview," and Alexander Petrov of PPBmex Animation, Montreal, animated "Rose."
Although "Rhapsody in Blue" is the music for all four spots, each track is different, and Talbott was the conduit between the artists and the music company, Trivers/Myers Music, Manhattan Beach, Calif.
"Most animation directors like to begin with some soundtrack in mind, some tempo," explains Talbott. "We had to get Trivers/Myers started with some demos right up front. We also wanted the directors’ opinions on the music tracks as well. Once they could give us some kind of animatic, then the music company could better define their track. It’s a lot of keeping on top of all those things."
Talbott was on top of all four spots, which were in production simultaneously over a period of four or five months, making sure such details as United’s signage, logos, uniforms and so forth were correct.
Although the animation was done by hand, each spot required considerable post work—compositing, Inferno work, adding color and color correction. In addition, all four spots were finished in high definition.
Talbott defines her role as a communicator. "It is such a tight schedule and any information that you can give either the vendor or the creative team is crucial to the timing of the project," she says. "If some piece of information doesn’t get to the animation directors, they could be moving down the wrong path. We’ve all gotten used to being able to change things at the last minute and fix things. In animation, you really have to be sure about yourself once you’ve signed off on something."
