Quiksilver’s Mark Sloan to come aboard as director of design
TBWAChiatDay LA has hired Tanya LeSieur as chief production officer and Mark Sloan as director of design. Both LeSieur and Sloan will report to chief creative officer Stephen Butler, with Sloan joining this month and LeSieur following suit in late March.
As chief production officer, a newly created role, LeSieur will assume a seat on the agency’s management team alongside president Luis DeAnda, CCO Butler and chief strategy officer Nick Barham. She brings with her over 15 years of integrated production experience and will assume oversight of all agency creative output.
“The addition of Tanya, and her role, is a clear sign of our commitment to continue evolving and improving our creative output on behalf of our partners,” said DeAnda. “We are investing in the idea of a ‘make great stuff’ creative culture, and bringing all production capabilities under Tanya is the first big step for us.”
LeSieur comes to TBWA from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, where she has served as chief production officer since 2013. Prior to New York, Tanya spent four years as director of integrated production at Saatchi & Saatchi’s Los Angeles office, where she helped to build and advance the agency’s digital, technology, content and production teams. She also served as executive producer at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for 10 years, overseeing integrated teams for brand and retail work on multiple clients including Comcast, Netflix, Hewlett-Packard, Saturn and Budweiser.
LeSieur has produced award-winning work throughout her career, winning recognition at Cannes, the One Show and the D&AD awards, among others. She has also served on D&AD and AICP Next Awards juries for both Digital and Content, as well as on the AICP Show Curatorial Committee.
As director of design, Sloan will spearhead the origination and growth of the agency’s design capabilities, working closely with the creative and production departments to seamlessly integrate creative efforts aesthetically. Sloan brings with him over 12 years of comprehensive design experience, having launched his own eponymous design studio, Studio Sloan, in 2003.
Simultaneously, Sloan has held lead creative director roles on both the client and agency sides of the business. Most recently, he was creative director at Quiksilver in Huntington Beach, Calif., where he led visual design and established global creative direction for both internal and external brand-focused content. Prior to joining Quiksilver, Sloan was executive creative director at Anomaly in Amsterdam, where he created work for Converse, Fox, Fox Sports, and FitVermogen, a division of ING. He also served as an art director/designer and later as head of design at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, where he worked across brands including Nike, Heineken, Electronic Arts, EYE Film Institute Netherlands and Coca-Cola.
No stranger to the TBWA network, Sloan spent one year as an associate creative director at TBWAMedia Arts Lab working on iPhone 4S while also serving as an instructor at his alma mater, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
“Our mission for the year is to once again turn TBWAChiatDay LA into a creative factory–one equipped with all the skills and craft that is required for the speed at which we need to work, while delivering the quality that is expected of us,” said CCO Butler. “To do this, we are going to need unique individuals. Tanya and Mark are both rightfully renowned for their creative weaponry and their high regard for craft, and having them on board will give us the competitive edge that we are seeking.”
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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