Pretty pictures are great, but what you can really get excited about is when an actor does something really great and you helped him or her get there," says director Mark Celentano of bicoastal WildLife Management, a division of bicoastal OneSuch Films. "I will always push everything visually, but you can’t help but want to make the people really come to life. And hopefully the visuals and the performance are not mutually exclusive."
Whether it’s two macho fisherman talking haircuts in "Fishing" for Supercuts, out of McCann-Erickson, San Francisco, or a couple on the road in "Mobile Home" for Kelly Tires, via Marcus Advertising, Cleveland, or people getting proprietary about grapes in the California Grape Commission’s "Will," also out of McCann-Erickson, Celentano is able to elicit striking performances while keeping the visuals interesting. With the excitement of a little kid about to share his latest and greatest revelation, Celentano praises an acting class he happened to stumble upon. "I would always walk by this little studio in my neighborhood," says Celentano. "So last year, I started taking classes and learning all sorts of fun things about how to communicate with the actors."
Celentano put his communication skills to work on a spec spot called "Ump" for adidas. The ad features an umpire standing in his boxer shorts in a locker room performing his pre-game ritual. To make the umpire’s otherwise ordinary tasks of shaving and practicing his calls interesting and entertaining, Celentano told the actor, Jim Pyduck, that he didn’t want to be able to understand anything he was saying.
"Real umpires seem to use no consonants and exaggerate their vowels," explains Celentano. "So ‘strike’ sounds like ‘EEEE—R—IIIIII-K,’ and ‘ball’ sounds like ‘AAAAAAAAHHHHH. There are thirty-second pieces where Jim is the funniest guy in the world," Celentano says. "I had a hard time concluding which one was the best cut. I went for style. I went for the ones with a little bit of everything." Celentano enhanced Pyduck’s realistic performance with a dramatic black-and-white set, extreme close-ups, quick pulls and overlapping sound.
Building blocks
Before Celentano thought about directing commercials for a living, he seriously considered becoming an architect. He enrolled at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., then transferred to Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y., and traveled to Florence, Italy, for a semester. "I thought architecture was the greatest thing in the world," he says. "Then the architects I was meeting explained that it wasn’t nearly as
