Welcome to the Special Spring 2018 Edition of SHOOT’s Directors Series. Our mix of profiles includes Luca Guadagnino whose Call Me by Your Name landed four Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, and Bryan Fogel who won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Icarus. Both filmmakers also have production company affiliations for commercials and branded content—Little Minx for Guadagnino, and Supply&Demand for Fogel.
On the spotmaking front, we profile Martin de Thurah of Epoch Films who recently won the DGA Award as Best Commercial Director of the Year. And then there’s the prolific spot and music video duo, Dom&Nic, who are handled in the U.S. by Station Film and in the U.K. by Outsider.
Another ad artisan, director DeMane Davis—who is repped by Sweet Rickey—now finds herself committed to another discipline for the next six months or so as producing director for season three of Queen Sugar, Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed primetime series on Oprah Winfrey’s network OWN.
We also connect with accomplished narrative filmmaker Rebecca Miller who’s made her first foray into the documentary discipline with a personal, eye-opening look into the life of her father, the late, legendary playwright Arthur Miller.
Rounding out our profiles lineup are two filmmakers who have scored on this year’s festival circuit. Alison Klayman with Take Your Pills, a documentary which premiered at SXSW; and Rudy Valdez whose feature directorial debut The Sentence won the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Klayman’s roost for commercials and branded fare is Washington Square Films while Valdez has come aboard the spotmaking roster of Park Pictures.
Meanwhile our ensemble of up-and-coming talent consists of a skate video filmmaker who just made a major breakthrough at Sundance; a director who established herself in London, has turned out some initial notable U.S. campaign work and is just taking on her first representation in the American ad market; a prolific music video director who has since diversified into commercials, branded content and shorts; and a helmer whose work in fashion, music and dance has struck a responsive chord with brands and audiences.
SHOOT also delves into Leading Producers, gleaning insights from Peter Spears, a first-time producer who became a Best Picture Oscar nominee for Call Me by Your Name; Alison Benson, EP of HBO’s Divorce; Ken Biller, EP of Genius, covering season 1 on Albert Einstein and the much anticipated season 2 on Pablo Picasso; Mike Medavoy, EP of the limited series The Long Road Home; and Jane Root, who’s teaming with Darren Aronofsky to produce the docuseries One Strange Rock.
And then in our Cinematographers & Cameras Series, we meet three DPs—one who recently won his first ASC Award on the strength of The Crown; another who lensed Strong Island, nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar; and a lenser whose career was launched by David Fincher with the Netflix series Mindhunter, which in turn has opened up new spot opportunities.
Director Profiles:
DeMane Davis
Martin de Thurah
Dom& Nic
Bryan Fogel
Luca Guadagnino
Alison Klayman
Rebecca Miller
Rudy Valdez
Features:
Up-and-Coming Directors: Springing Forward With New Talent
Leading Producers Fresh Produce: Perspectives on Film, TV
Cinematographers & Cameras: Insights into The Crown, Strong Island, Mindhunter, Spots
Forsman & Bodenfors Shifts Its Singapore Group Creative Director Ivan Guerra to Its NYC Hub
Forsman & Bodenfors (F&B) has expanded its creative leadership in New York by relocating longtime group creative director Ivan Guerra from the Singapore office to the Big Apple to support a quickly growing list of new client wins.
As a group creative director in Singapore, Guerra racked up numerous accolades and participated in a myriad of new business wins that fueled the agency’s growth year over year. He explained why now was the right time to come back to the states, adding more nuance in the process. ”Singapore is the business hub of Asia, New York is the business hub of the world,” he said. “Our office in Singapore was small when I arrived. Since then, we’ve more than tripled in size, and became the [number one] most creative agency in the country, and work with more and bigger clients than ever before. There’s always more to be done, but the agency I’m leaving behind is in fantastic shape and ready to take on the world, as I know they will.”
For Guerra, there’s an opportunity to replicate in New York the success he had in Singapore. During his career, he repositioned and promoted businesses and products across a wide variety of markets and industries including P&G, Coca-Cola and Booking.com. Some of his well-known work includes a campaign that increased Samsung’s sales in the Middle East by almost 200%, one of the most iconic films in the history of Converse, Verizon’s most successful sports partnership program “Data Dunk” with the NBA, and a “Proud Whopper” campaign in 2014 that reignited Burger King and garnered 13 Cannes Lions and a Grand Clio.
Coming back to New York after 15 years in the business, including a stint where he spent time at the likes of top-shelf agencies like R/GA,... Read More