A joyous stateside debut
By Robert Goldrich
In November 2008, The Sweet Shop signed director Mr. Hide (pronounced Hee-day) for worldwide representation (except for Japan where he continues to work through Directors Guild, a longstanding Tokyo shop he co-founded). While The Sweet Shop is enamored with Mr. Hide’s talent–as assessed by the judicious eye of company president Stephen Dickstein, who has a long track record of helping to build and develop filmmakers’ careers–the company couldn’t have imagined the impact the director has made in a relatively short span, particularly in the American ad market.
The linchpin for this splash has been the Toyota Prius campaign out of Saatchi & Saatchi LA, the centerpiece spot being “Harmony.”
The colorful, cheerful commercial finds a Prius negotiating a lively landscape in which people make up the mountains, the grass, the rivers, the sun and clouds.
This makes for an enjoyable commute, with the driver loving not only the comforts and performance of the Prius hybrid, but also the fact that the vehicle yields lower emissions, which will benefit the environment.
Saatchi L.A. executive creative director Mike McKay explained, “We thought it was really interesting that this was the first vehicle that had harmony between the driver and nature, so that’s where the core idea came from.”
After viewing Mr. Hide’s reel of whimsical, charming work, McKey said the agency knew the director represented the perfect fit for the campaign.
Shot in Auckland, N.Z., the Prius campaign marked the first U.S. commercial work for Mr. Hide. But beyond being an auspicious debut stateside that has resonated with viewers worldwide, the feel-good Prius campaign has taken on signature piece status for The Sweet Shop itself.
Dickstein noted that the new global incarnation of The Sweet Shop started in October 2008 during the throes of recession. While hardly the ideal time for a launch, it also isn’t a time for messages tinged with darkness, cynicism, irony and sarcasm. Thus the aptly titled “Harmony” came at a fortuitous time.
“The Prius work defined our brand and forced me to change all our directors’ reels, affirming a joy and joyousness credo,” related Dickstein. “I even stopped talking to some directors we had been exploring who didn’t fit that credo. Prius was our stake in the ground in terms of the tone and kind of work we need to do in order to address today’s difficult times.”
Dickstein saw that vibe in much of Mr. Hide’s work back in Japan. But joyful in and of itself isn’t enough. The filmmaker’s meticulous, thorough attention to detail is essential to the joy ride as evidenced in “Harmony” for which Mr. Hide oversaw a cast of 200 extras costumed to look like grass, river and cloud people, and so on. When it came to the look of the costumes, Mr. Hide aimed to create an organic feel.
“Since the only physical senses that a commercial can appeal to are sight and hearing, how we communicate to the other senses using the visual was really important. I wanted textures that looked like they would be pleasant to touch,” explained Mr. Hide in SHOOT‘s “Top Spot of the Week” feature coverage (6/19) of “Harmony.”
“For the clouds,” he continued, “we used cushiony balls of cotton that felt and looked the way I had imagined clouds. Also, for the flowers, I wanted bright, happy colors that looked like they would smell good.”
Movement was also a critical element in the spot. Mr. Hide cast a core group of 30 dancers to handle the more intricate movements as well as rock climbers and martial artists to take on the more physically demanding roles of clouds and tree people. Mr. Hide had his water people jumping on trampolines to create the effect of a rushing river.
Ultimately about 90 percent of the action was caught in camera. When the shoot ended, Mr. Hide worked with Auckland post/visual effects studio Perceptual Engineering to put the spot together. Also contributing on the effects front were Fin Design+Effects in Sydney, Brickyard VFX, Santa Monica, and Lizard Lounge in Wellington, N.Z.
“This wasn’t a job I could hand off right after shooting wrapped. I was involved with the compositing of every shot,” said Mr. Hide. “To make it look crafty, we really built the whole thing out of many jigsaw pieces, so the shoot was only for providing the raw materials that we had to put together in postproduction. It was only when we started post that we could see how all of the pieces fit together as a whole.”
Global citizen Born in West Germany, Mr. Hide found himself living all over the map with his parents’ career travels, from the U.K. to Japan and elsewhere. As a high school student, he became passionate about still photography and then took the next logical progression to wanting to learn how to best make those images move.
That aspiration led him to Pasadena Art Center where he studied film and design, turning out assorted student projects, mostly short films. Upon graduating, he returned to Tokyo and directed a feature-length film, A Loose Boy, but found the movie-making business in Japan a bit stagnant. This caused him to explore other opportunities, leading to an assistant/glorified runner’s position at Dentsu in both its agency and production operations.
The Dentsu experience, which spanned seven years, turned out to be an education with Mr. Hide moving up the ranks and his eventually getting the chance to direct a spot for Japan’s Fuji-Q Amusement Park through the Dentsu Tec production arm. Momentum began to build for Mr. Hide with subsequent Fuji-Q campaigns over the years as well as a spot for a green tea product that earned award accolades in Japan.
Then in 2004, at the age of 30, Mr. Hide exited Dentsu Tec and his exclusive directorial relationship there in order to branch out. He later launched the alluded to Directors Guild in Tokyo, partnered with two other directors. Today, Directors Guild is a 12-director shop.
At Directors Guild, Mr. Hide became an accomplished director, turning out a wide range of commercials. A couple of years ago, he helmed his second feature, Don/Ju (English translation: Dumb Beast), a stylistic dark comedy, adding to his reputation in Japan’s filmmaking/creative arts community.
Stateside reach In ’08, Mr. Hide looked to extend his reach internationally, with his work eliciting interest from several prominent houses stateside.
He struck up a rapport with Dickstein and came aboard The Sweet Shop (Culver City, Calif., New York, London and Auckland), gaining a global footprint. (Mr Hide recently moved to Los Angeles.)
The Sweet Shop first landed Mr. Hide the breakthrough three-spot package for Prius out of Saatchi, which in turn has garnered him attention from other ad shops.
This has translated, for example, into Mr. Hide’s first foray into the Chicago agency market as he recently wrapped an ambitious, high-profile assignment which he wasn’t yet at liberty to publicly discuss.
The job for an undisclosed client of Cramer-Krasselt, Chicago, has an uplifting, upbeat tone like the Prius fare but is distinctly different conceptually and cinematically.
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