After more than 20 years of shooting food, flowers and other stunningly lit inanimate objects, tabletop director Mathew Brady shows no signs of slowing down. "It’s still fun," reports Brady, who directs out of bicoastal/ international @radical.media. "Some people say that advertising sucks, and it’s not like the old days, but I find that when you get out of bed and go to work, you make it what it is."
As part of the Smirnoff Ice Triple Black campaign, "Intelligent Nightlife," out of J. Walter Thompson (JWT), New York, Brady made the alcoholic beverage into a tough-but-glamorous star performer. One of the spots, "Wire Cutter," shows a bottle of Smirnoff Ice being freed from a casing of barbed wire. Another, entitled "Bottle Builder," shows the clear liquid being poured into the bottle by an unseen machine, which then places the cap on top, clamps it into a futuristic martini shaker and mixes it up.
None of the Brady-directed "Intelligent Nightlife" spots—including "Magnet," the third ad—feature actual intelligent life. Instead, they are exclusively tabletop, with the product itself taking center stage. "[J. Walter Thompson’s chief creative officer] Mike Campbell is the one who talked about bringing tabletop back," recalls John Wagner, associate creative director at JWT, and art director on "Magnet." "I had done a billboard—a bottle of Smirnoff Ice Triple Black with barbed wire around it—and Mike said, ‘Can we bring that to life?’ "
When it came time to find a director, Campbell suggested Brady. Having worked with Brady on various Domino’s Pizza ads, the chief creative officer spoke highly of his technical skills. Wagner soon saw why. "[Brady] brought a look to the spots, and his lighting was fantastic," he recalls. "When you put barbed wire around the bottle, it’s actually very difficult to light, but he did it beautifully. He’s also a very collaborative director. We really enjoyed working with him."
The feeling was mutual. "We shot a lot of great footage, and they did an excellent job of cutting it and putting it together," Brady says. (Namakula Musoke of Final Cut, New York, edited the spots). "It was a good project to work on because I had the freedom to be creative."
He exercised that freedom on "Bottle Builder." "When we started out, it was going to be a simple bottle, and they would fill it, but the camera would never move," Brady recalls. "To bring more interest to it, I thought the camera should go in tighter rather than just having a locked-off shot of the bottle."
The creatives agreed, and all were pleased with the results. "It has such a great look," remarks Brady, who adds that he enjoys collaborating closely with agency creatives. "With a lot of the projects I get involved in, I draw my own boards and come up with the ways I’d like to shoot it to give them a direction. Then I’m always open because the agency might say, ‘Well, what if we do this or that.’ It really is a team effort."
still life
A former still photographer, Brady worked with the late legendary art director Roy Grace, then of Doyle Dane Bernbach, New York, on such print campaigns as American Tourister Luggage’s "Overturned Car," which earned a Clio award in 1980. "Roy was very instrumental in giving me my start [as a director]," recalls Brady, who made the move from print to TV ads in the early ’80s. "He was looking for good tabletop, and he saw my demo reel and said, ‘I love your lighting and the way you handle things.’ We wound up working together on spots for Mobil 1 and SOS Pads [including the Clio-award winning 1983 ad, ‘Box II’] and other clients."
Brady’s tabletop career flourished. "There were only a handful of directors at the time, and there really was this wide-open door, so I went out there and started doing it," he states. Before long, he had formed his own production company, Mathew Brady Films, New York. "I thought, ‘This is the way to go, [being] self-contained,’ " he remembers. "And it really was. I had a large stage; it was a great space."
In ’01, Brady entered into an association with Scream, Los Angeles, to provide production and marketing support, although he continued to work under his eponymous banner, although he eventually decided to close his own shop. "You’re dealing with employees, you’re dealing with insurance and landlords and things, and meanwhile you have to be creative," Brady explains of shuttering his shop. "I just got to that place in life where I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t have that many years ahead of me,’ and I decided to get rid of it. Screen Gems [New York] took over my space, my equipment and fixture fees."
After freelancing for a while, Brady signed with @radical.media last summer. "The funny thing is, Jon Kamen [co-proprietor of @radical.media] is an old friend, but I hadn’t even thought of @radical because they didn’t have any tabletop people there—it was just all young, hot directors," he says. "One day, I had lunch with Jon and his partner Frank [Scherma], and he said, ‘You know, you’d be the right person for this place. You have a lot of experience, you’re a great problem solver and you’re creative. We’d handle all the other stuff.’ I said, ‘That sounds great,’ and we shook hands and signed a deal.
"It’s really the best company around," Brady adds of his new roost.
Over the years, Brady has shot everything from Snickers bars to Coca-Cola to White Castle hamburgers to roses, sunflowers and lilies for 1-800-FLOWERS. Though "classic, beautiful food" is his favorite subject matter, he enjoys making anything look good, and he has never shied away from a challenge. "When I start working with my hands on-set, I come up with ideas I’d never have thought of in the pre-pro," he says. "That’s basically my style. I have a lot of ideas, and I just keep throwing them out."
The advent of CGI and other post technologies has enabled Brady to take on larger workloads. "I’ve always been a purist when I shoot things—I shoot them very clean—but now I don’t have to," he notes. "Let’s say there’s a rod in the shot that’s making an effect happen. For me to disguise it and everything else [in-camera], we can lose hours on the set. Now we don’t have to do that because we can clean it up in post. It helps us to do so much more."
With spots like those for Smirnoff Ice Triple Black breathing new life into tabletop, the veteran director looks forward to an exciting—and busy—future. "When I got into the business, they were doing thirty-second spots of just tabletop—food or whatever it might be," he recalls. "That drifted away, and it became inserts … but now I’m finding it turning around again. We’re doing more and more complete fifteen- or thirty-second spots, where it’s all product. I’m enjoying that a lot."
