NYC-headquartered creative design, animation and mixed media studio LOBO has expanded its sales team, adding Nathan Skillicorn of Heart, Brains & Nerve to handle the Midwest and James Bartlett of Mr. Bartlett to help cover the East Coast. Bartlett will work alongside LOBO’s existing East Coast sales team, Minerva, led by Mary Knox and Shauna Seresin. Heart, Brains & Nerve’s roster also includes Believe, Hound, Friends Electric, Schrom and Seed. Mr. Bartlett’s roster also includes Diktator, Jump Editorial, The Marmalade and Strike Anywhere.
HERO: Creative Management and Strategy has launched in Los Angeles, providing independent sales and talent management to the commercial production industry in the West Coast and Texas markets. Founded by Harrison Elkins, HERO represents shops across live action production, VFX and animation, editorial, and music and audio. Current roster clients include Spark & Riot, Fancy Content, Gentlemen, and Ring the Alarm. Elkins has a decade of talent management and sales experience across major U.S. markets, most recently serving as head of sales at bicoastal studio Humble + Postal for over three years, setting new sales benchmarks and positioning the company for direct-to-brand partnerships. Recent client work booked through HERO includes a new Jaguar campaign for Spark & Riot with Spark44, M&C Saatchi’s new campaign for the San Diego Zoo with Gentlemen, and ongoing work with Beats by Dre for Ring the Alarm.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) Thinkbox has added Will McDonald as head of business development. Based in Seattle, McDonald now leads client relationships for AWS Thinkbox, working closely with the business development team to help studios manage on-premises resources and rendering on the cloud. McDonald comes to AWS Thinkbox from Conductor Technologies, where he served as VP of product and helped launch the company’s cloud-based rendering platform. He has also spent more than four years at Autodesk as sr. manager of interactive and emerging technology, and has held various art, TD and R&D roles at Electronic Arts, ILM and Pixar Animation Studios…
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this โ and those many "Babadook" memes โ unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables โ "Bah-Bah-Doooook" โ an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More