Pam Thomas loves MTV. "It’s the graduate school of guerilla filmmaking," she says, and she learned her trade there.
The director helms spots out of bicoastal Moxie Pictures, and the skills she picked up during her seven years at MTV are evident. Take Nike’s "Brew," out of Wieden+ Kennedy, Portland, Ore., in which Alex Rodriguez, shortstop for the Seattle Mariners, carefully loads his athletic gearaincluding a baseball bat and a piece of turfainto a blender, and drinks. Thomas helmed the spot while at her former roost, bicoastal Satellite.
At Moxie, she’s helmed "Acting" for the Oakland Athletics, via FCB San Francisco. In it, team members including Ben Grieve, Kevin Appier and Gil Heredia strike out in their attempt to be thespians as they participate in an actors’ workshop. The ad then cuts to footage of the guys playing baseball, proving that while they can’t act, they certainly can play.
Although she excels at comedy and dialogue, Thomas’ visuals are arresting too. Dockers’ "Buckle Up" via FCB, which has never aired, is a perfect antithesis to the comedic spots mentioned above. In the ad, a man gets ready to go out for the night. Suddenly, images of what is about to happen flash through his head in rapid, color-saturated sequences, which are juxtaposed with the black-and-white languor of his apartment.
Thomas recently returned to comedy, though, with three spots: Sega Dreamcast’s "Play Online," "Packers Pack" and "Crush Crew," via FCB. The first spot is a hymn to the all-American pastime of computer gaming, which features children wreaking havoc in their exuberance to trample Sega opponents online. The other two spots combine a home video-like look at rabid football fans, which is mixed with animated players such as Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss.
Thomas was studying still photography at the University of Delaware in Newark when she got an internship at MTV in 1984, and another in the winter of ’85. "I just fell into directing," she recalls. "I thought I would be a still photographer. But when I interned at MTV, I thought, ‘Oh this is interesting. It’s like still photography, except it’s moving.’ "
After graduating from college in ’85 she joined the cable network as a production assistant. There Thomas assisted director Mark Pellington, then at MTV, who is currently represented for spotwork by bicoastal/ international Propaganda Films. "He let me go out and shoot," she relates, "and he said that if it went wrong he’d take the blame!" So she learned to direct, and had an unsuccessful brush with animation. "I’d never done it before and I wanted to see how it was done," explains Thomas. "When you actually do animation, you don’t draw every frame; you draw key frames and you make the eyes or mouth move. I didn’t know that, so I drew 350 frames of the same thing over and over with their eyes blinking," she says. "I decided that I never wanted to do animation."
Thomas instead worked in the MTV On-Air Promotions department, eventually becoming a supervising producer there. "It was a really good place to learn because the budgets were small," Thomas recounts. "You were forced to be really creative." Within a few years she had started directing MTV promos and show opens for programs such as Remote Control, and soon she starting helming clips for everyone from Vanessa Williams to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Because she didn’t have representation, artists often called her directly. "Prince called me at home. I didn’t believe it was him and I hung up," she laughs. "He called me back though."
