Billed as an experimental genre of filmmaking, the "bookVideo" made its debut this summer, showcasing the work of several directors from different disciplines, including Mark Pellington, who’s represented for spots by bicoastal/international Propaganda Films. Rain, a New York production company founded in ’98 to pursue projects in new media, film and TV, sought out Pellington and other helmers last year to help create and develop content for Barnes & Noble Television (BNTV), an Internet television programming effort by Barnes & Noble. com. Viewed using RealPlayer, a new film has been spotlighted each week.
Ilene Saul, Rain’s owner/executive producer, credited the late Tibor Kalman, founder of New York-based design company M&Co, with inspiring the bookVideo. "Tibor had a relationship with Barnes & Noble and a relationship with Rain, and he had this idea of doing something sort of sexy and trailer-like for books," recalled Saul. "So that got us thinking about this concept, and we began to refer to it as the bookVideo. He passed away before we actually got to realize any of it-but what you see today is a result of his thinking."
Saul explained that the goal was to do for books what music videos had done for music: provide three to five minutes of visuals that would capture the vibe of the book, thereby creating an additional method of promoting interesting work. A wide net was cast in choosing directors, with people drawn from the disciplines of music videos, feature films, commercials, television production, interior design and graphic design. "There are no rules right now," said Saul. "The idea was to put some really interesting creative minds from different disciplines on the project and see what we could come up with."
Pellington came into the fold through his friend Stuart Cohn, who at the time was Rain’s bookVideo commissioner. Cohn-who has since left Rain to work at MTV-has been a friend of Pellington for many years; the two worked together on Buzz, a 13-part series commissioned by MTV in ’90. Other Buzz alumni, music video directors Mark
Neale and Grant Gee, have also applied their talents to BNTV projects. A British native, Neale moved to the U.S. two years ago and is represented for spot work and music videos by bicoastal You Media, and for other projects via Radar Entertainment, Burbank. Gee lives in his native London, where he is represented for music videos through the Oil Factory.
