A recently launched hybrid production company has found a new talent source for its various projects: the contemporary art world. Slo Graffiti, a satellite of Los Angeles-based Palomar Pictures, is repping several artists and photographers as well as a roster of commercial and feature directors. The company’s lineup is creating work for both well-established and nascent advertising media. Slo Graffiti is the sort of shop where an artist may direct a spot or a commercial director might work on a Web site.
Slo Graffiti, which was launched in August, represents a veteran Hollywood director like John Frankenheimer and Game Theory, a directing collective whose members are all recent graduates of the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif. Other company spot directors include Rafael Fernandez, the Snorri Brothers (a.k.a. Eidur and Einar Snorri), and Victor Robert. In addition to the aforementioned Frankenheimer, Slo Graffiti handles feature directors such as Luc Besson, John Dahl, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Neil Jordan and Greg Mottola, and visual artists such as Doug Aitkin, Gregory Crewdson, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Tony Oursler. Additionally, the company has a representation deal with Fullerene Productions, Los Angeles, which is a Web animation shop comprised of directors and designers.
"I’d been looking for inspiration in all the same places that ad agency creatives do," says Laura Howard, executive producer/creative director at the new company, talking about the genesis of the new shop. Howard was most recently head of sales/ director of client direct business, at bicoastal Tool of North America. Browsing magazines such as Parquet, Level and Blind Spot, Howard saw how much advertising was inspired by the work of artists and photographers. "I realized that there was no one place for creatives to go to have access to those artists. I wanted to create one," she says.
"I knew [artists were interested in getting] support for projects that their galleries won’t do or don’t have the money to fund," continues Howard. "I saw a link between some of the corporate manifestos that are out there these days and some of the dream projects. I thought the best thing to do would be to get some of these big corporations to sponsor these multimedia ventures."
To that end, Howard started talking with Joni Sighvatsson, chairman/CEO of Palomar. "I had been wanting to have my own thing for a while. I had met Joni a little while earlier on a project called Tunnelvision [in 1997] that I started a few years ago with my then-partner, Charlie Watson," she explains. Tunnelvision, which is one of the projects Slo Graffiti is currently working on, consists of a series of posters on subway tunnel walls that are illuminated by strobe lights to create an animated advertisement that can be viewed by passengers on the train. It has been displayed in Pittsburgh, and negotiations are currently underway to install the project in London and San Francisco.
"I met Joni because I was looking for a patron for Tunnelvision," relates Howard. "He really liked the idea and what I was doing at Tool, which was working with clients directly."
Eventually, Sighvatsson asked Howard to join him and Palomar president/co-owner Jonathon Ker to launch Slo Graffiti. "The idea was to bring in artists and directors and to be able to go to clients and say, ‘Listen, we can work with you on TV ads, Web sites, guerrilla-type things, projections on buildings, Tunnelvision, and do campaigns in a multimedia platform,’" explains Howard. "A lot of companies have been scrambling to try and set up new media divisions. I think that’s missed the point. New media is not just the Internet. I think new media is learning the language of the way people communicate now. We’ve taken people who I feel are the most talented at what they do, who are the most open and embrace capitalistic society, and find a good way to blend art and commerce."
Sighvatsson says that Slo Graffiti was set up to give full attention to new talent and to bring artists from other disciplines onboard. "It would be a strain on the management resources of Palomar, as is, to do that," notes Sighvatsson. "We have our own directors to support. It makes sense to form a new division that focuses on [the new roster]. That kind of building process takes a lot of time and effort."
Howard thinks one reason that Slo Graffiti will be successful is that the company is diversified. She says her outfit suffered through the recently ended SAG/AFTRA strike against the advertising industry, but also points out that they remained busy with other projects. "I did a lot of meetings with big ad agencies at that time," she says. "People really responded to some of the ideas and the things that we’re putting together, especially short films for the Internet."
Slo Graffiti has an outlet on the Web for shorts, via an arrangement with Internet film site iFILM. "We met the folks at iFILM at Sundance this year and started a dialogue about being curators for them. They’re giving us this special showcase page which will launch with their new redesign," says Howard.
Oregon, a 12-minute mini-thriller created by director Fernandez is currently on the iFILM site. Howard was impressed by the short, and Slo Graffiti promptly signed the director. Not long afterwards, Fernandez helmed the first three spots to be produced under the Slo Graffiti banner. The trio of ads were: "Barber," "Bingo," and "License," for the Partnership For A Healthy Mississippi’s anti-tobacco campaign via Maris, West & Baker, Jackson, Miss.
"Barber" shows a young man getting a haircut in an old-fashioned barber shop with an elderly clientele. The barber carefully shaves only the top of the teenager’s head, and when the barber is through, the kid is sporting a nasty comb-over that echoes the regulars’ hairstyles. A voiceover says, "You wouldn’t want their haircut. Why would you want their lungs? Question it." Then the ad’s copy appears: "Eighteen-year-old smokers have fifty-year-old lungs." Another spot, "Bingo," offers a similar scenario featuring a teenage girl stuck in the midst of a bunch of bingo-playing seniors.
"Rafael co-wrote two of the anti-smoking spots [‘Barber’ and ‘Bingo’]," relates Howard. "He worked with the agency for four or five days concepting. They knew that he could do that because he did everything on Oregon. All of the people that have come to my division are people who can take a blank piece of paper and make something. They’re not people who need to have a very structured storyboard to work from. We encourage collaboration as much as possible," says Howard.
Recent Slo Graffiti projects outside the commercial arena include a promotional short film called Rhetorical Distortion for the clothing line Ecko, directed by Wyatt Troll, who is represented for spots by Palomar, but directed the project through Slo Graffiti. Another Ecko project is now in the works. The multifaceted production company is also creating a Web site for Manuscript Originals, a company owned by Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash. And Fernandez, the Snorri Brothers, Game Theory and John Frankenheimer are currently bidding on spot jobs.
How did Howard come up with the company’s name? "I’ve been in advertising a little while now, and realized that as production companies, we are architects of code," she relates. "To me, how you say something is as important as what you’re saying because the media place is so overcrowded.
"Graffiti has almost become like a pattern in nature," continues Howard. "It’s code for how you’re trying to speak to a specific type of audience. For me, that’s what artists have been doing for a long time. They have this language; they know how to communicate with people."q
