Don’t ask directing team Christoph Chrudimak and Moritz Friedel about what their nom de film, rad-ish, means. They’re tired of the question and they say they don’t know. "It has no meaning," says Chrudimak. "We don’t know where it came from. Someone gave it to us one day some years ago because Americans were not able to spell our real names."
If that’s really the case, it’s probably a good thing they have an America-friendly handle. Rad-ish, already a hot property in Europe, is getting a lot of attention in the States these days. The pair, which signed with bicoastal Go Film a year and a half ago, currently has a 10-spot package for the Nissan Altima, from TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, in heavy rotation. And two spots for Mercedes-Benz, "Reincarnation" and "Wired House," out of Merkley Newman Harty (MNH), New York, broke earlier this month.
The team’s roots are in Europe. They met in 1995, in Vienna, where Chrudimak was an assistant director and Friedel a line producer on music videos. Both were interested in directing, and decided to pair up, a decision that proved wise. Their reel, which includes notable U.S. work for the likes of Nintendo Game Boy, Sony PlayStation and Nissan, as well as for a number of European advertisers, is heavy on big, cinematic images and action, with plenty of surreal themes and real-time manipulation. But like many commercial directors, Chrudimak and Friedel are looking for ways to avoid being classified, and earlier this month they were in Berlin directing a dialogue-driven campaign for Orange, the European cell phone network. The 12-spot package out of Lowe, Zurich—including the ads "Getting Together" and "The Joke"—was produced via Input Films, Berlin.
"Once you get into visual stuff, you tend to get visual work a lot," Friedel observes. "You are not considered heavily for a dialogue spot if you haven’t done dialogue. There’s obviously a time for everything to happen, and we are shooting for Orange here and we’re shooting dialogue." The campaign, aimed at the European market, is in English and, according to Friedel, hard to describe.
Their visual style is on display in spots like "Side Effects," "Claustrophobia" and "May Impair," part of their Nissan Altima campaign. In each ad, the car is displayed in flips, spins and zooms in natural settings. Highlighting their ability to handle effects jobs is "Concourse" for Nintendo via Leo Burnett USA, Chicago. "Concourse" turns real people into the surreal two-dimensional characters of Nintendo Game Boy games, and manipulates them in an airport setting. Individuals on a people-mover attack each other in cartoon fashion and are ultimately transformed into characters on a Game Boy screen.
Unlike most of rad-ish’s highly stylized spots, "Concourse" was heavy on digital effects. For the most part, visual effects in the team’s spots are created in-camera. Rad-ish does effects jobs, "every now and then," Chrudimak says, but he doesn’t want to be known for them. "You get fed up after a while. I remember, sometime last year, we were asked to do a very prestigious project with a lot of money involved that was very transition-driven. They were pushing and pushing. We said, ‘Please understand, we have done this so many times. It’s not fun to do the same thing.’ You get a project in, and with us, there are a lot of visual ideas [that come to us from agencies]. We like to play around with technical stuff on occasion, but that’s why it’s refreshing to be doing this dialogue series right now. It’s different."
Friedel and Chrudimak are often called on by agencies to contribute to the creative process, although their involvement varies from spot to spot. "Sometimes we get a job and they say, ‘There have to be pink panties in it; do whatever you think is right,’ " Friedel relates. "On another job, you get a board and do the board. Sometimes we do it so it feels right to us. Luckily, most people we work with lately are interested in having somebody to communicate with. They have an idea and they say, ‘OK, that’s our idea; what do you think?’ Then you bring up whatever points you have, and that sometimes leads to certain changes."
With much European experience, and a growing list of high-profile U.S. spots recently, rad-ish has had a good chance to compare the two advertising cultures, but the men say they’re not favoring one over the other. "We take it as it comes," explains Friedel. "A nice board from France, a nice board from the States, a nice board from, I don’t know where—Switzerland. We follow that flow in a way."
