At this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival, Seattle-headquartered Getty Images presented a series of short films created by noted filmmakers and designers, some with ties to the ad industry. The series, known as the "The Big Idea," featured seven shorts expressing what is meant by "idea."
The selected filmmakers and designers were given the brief of completing a 60-second piece on the theme in 28 days. Getty only had a few stipulations, including that at least half of the content in each film had to come from the large collection of digital stills and moving imagery available at the company’s Web site.
In addition to the Cannes screening, "The Big Idea" series was also presented at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theater in New York, and will screen at CineSpace, Hollywood, in September. And some of"The Big Idea" shorts will be featured in the "By Design" section of ResFest 2004, a traveling digital film festival. (Getty has also created a DVD version of the series.)
The seven films in the series are: The Hole Hog, directed by Julian Gibbs of the London-based film production and design company Intro; What If, helmed by Jeremy Hollis-ter, president/creative director at creative services firm Plus et Plus, New York; Murmurs of Earth: Side B, helmed by the Los Angeles- based directing team Logan (Ben Conrad and Alexei Tylevich), who helm commercials via bicoastal Anonymous Content; Jellovution, directed by Pleix, a Paris-based digital arts collective; Creation, helmed by Jonathan Kneebone and Gary Freedman of The Glue Society, Sydney, who are repped through bicoastal/international @radical. media; Eyes, directed by Tokyo-based Koichiro Tsujikawa; and To Long For, helmed by Marc R. Wilkins, who is represented by Big Fish Film Productions, Berlin. Getty collaborated with RES Media Group, which has offices in Lon-don, New York and Los Angeles; the London companies Warp Records, The Moving Picture Company and Moving Brands; and the seven filmmakers on the pro- ject.
Stylistically, the films range from the David Lynch-like surrealism of The Hole Hog to the pulsing abstraction of Jellovution, and from the visual poetry of To Long For to the entrancing patterns of Eyes. What If’s inventive animation, the wry space travel meditation in Murmurs of the Earth: Side B, and a hum-orous depiction of a couple having sex in Creation round out the slate.
the concept
While artistic in nature, "The Big Idea" was the perfect venue for Getty to showcase its vast collec-tion. "We listen closely to our customers, and some of our main cli-ents are the advertising agency and production company community," explains Getty’s Jennifer Burak, VP of product marketing, film. "They asked us to make it easier and more inspirational to work with [Getty’s] footage. [They also wanted us to] improve the con- sistency and the quality of the footage that we offer. They told us we have the best, but they wanted even better."
Getty responded by upgrading their Web site so that users can preview full-screen, non-watermarked files that download quickly and are compatible with both PAL and NTSC format. (About 70,000 moving film clips are available at Getty’s Web site.) The company also started to collaborate with a larger roster of production companies to shoot new material, and Getty conducted research to make sure they were shooting what advertisers are looking for.
Once the upgrades were in place, Getty started looking for a way to get the word out. "As a result of these investments, we said, ‘How do we communicate how this industry is changing, even in the last eighteen months?’ " relates Burak. "The reason we did ‘The Big Idea’ was because we wanted to understand our customers’ production process better; we wanted to explore the possibilities of digital filmmaking by taking advantage of the functionality of the Web site; and we wanted to encourage the use of pre-shot imagery by seeing whole films that were created from this content so our customers could see how you could use it for both creative and economic advantages."
How did Getty come up with the project’s theme? "Part of it was we wanted to explore the pursuit of big ideas in general," says Burak. "That is what our customers have to do, day in and day out. By giving them free reign and full access to our entire library of content, we could be even closer to seeing how they come up with big ideas." In addition to the films, Getty produced making-of documentaries that are viewable at the company’s Web site and are included on the DVD.
The filmmakers were selected in part because of geography. "We wanted ‘The Big Idea’ to be globally relevant," Burak explains, "so we picked the seven main production hubs around the world so we could have an artist that could speak locally to that group.
"We also wanted to have a mixture," she continues. "Some guys came from a traditional production background, like The Glue Society who are repped by @radical.media; and Marc Wilkins, who’s repped by Big Fish. We knew these guys were traditional filmmakers with a really interesting body of work. On the flip side, we wanted to go after artists that are going into the digital world, that are mixing media, and were not coming from your traditional shooting background. … The seven films are very interesting because they’re very different in the way that they use the footage and the way they approach their project."
Getty is trying to get the message out that the labor-intensive routine of shipping tapes of footage back and forth is not the most efficient way to work. Burak notes that more and more, companies are beginning to understand how much the stock footage business is changing, and "The Big Idea" films help to illustrate the point.
"It’s a challenge to get people who are working around the clock as producers to change their behavior," she says, "but as we go in at the senior level, we’re getting really incredible response. And when they see ‘The Big Idea’ films, they are completely blown away. They usually invite us back to visit with other teams within their agency [or] production company."
Getty has plans to continue "The Big Idea" project, and Burak says that filmmakers and ad agencies are eager to get involved in future iterations of the series. "It sparks a lot of ideas," she says. "In general, people who are in this business feel the constraints of budgets and client requirements. Sometimes they just want a project that allows them to flex their creative muscles."
