We asked four award-winning directors of our Kollective: Sam Green, David Munro, Eric Escobar and John Dilley, to dig deep in their pasts and to share their first daring feat they “oh” so successfully survived with Kontent Films.
Sam Green: My first Kontent job…wow. It was a cooking-show type of piece. Working with a local chef. We filmed her talking about high-heat cooking and making several dishes. I was nervous. This was my first commercial directing gig. And we had a ton of shots/dishes to get through in a single day. Anyway, it all went pretty smoothly. The chef hadn’t done much TV before, so I had to put a lot of energy into bringing out a good performance — making her alive and likable. Like I said, it all was going pretty smoothly until about two-thirds of the way through the day when Teri took me aside with a very solemn manner and said that the new intern had just accidentally erased a huge chunk of what we’d shot while downloading the footage off a P2 card. FUCCKKKKK!
Well, that intern never worked again in this town! Just kidding. Seriously, the screw-up was a big blow, I’m not gonna lie to you, but it was pretty impressive how we just went back and did the caramelized scallops and the sautéed salmon again (only a hell of a lot faster). We jammed and got everything done, without going too far into overtime. And in the end, everyone was happy. It was a great success.
David Munro: My first job for Kontent was a Yahoo CES web video for Ogilvy One. The spot was a spoof on the Apollo 11 moon landing. Neil Armstrong takes his “one small step for man” and promptly whips out his cell phone – the control room goes wild.
Lasting memory was flipping through the boards. Not until the last page was there actually anything to shoot. I asked our producer Teri, “Um, don’t they just need an editor?” Nearly the entire spot, as-boarded, was found footage.
Happy ending….A lot of the archival stuff we thought would work didn’t, so we ended up shooting reaction shots of ground control (casting the agency writer and art director – who were naturals) and a lot of the “moon” footage we shot against a backdrop a local scenic company had recently painted. With masterful post-fx from our own Eric Escobar, it ended up looking better (imo) than a translight background we were considering that would have been much more complicated and time-consuming. Sometimes classic methods work best.
Eric Escobar: When Mark called me up and asked if I would direct a project for Ideo, he was deep in production on Unflinching and I was juggling teaching film classes at SF State and making a new short film. I had heard of Ideo, knew of their really cool reputation, and was really happy to get a paid directing gig. I had no idea what the project actually was.
It turns out that it was a documentary of how well a whole new Steelcase furniture design and delivery project had worked its first year out of the gate. The catch was that the video was a work of pure speculative fiction; there was no design and delivery project yet. Ideo does these hypothetical “what if we did x” type things as case studies of ideas.
So, working with Teri and a casting director, we cast actors to play Steelcase reps and customers. I created backstories and relationships between the characters. Then spent two days at the Steelcase showroom in Soma lounging on swanky hip office furniture, making a fake future documentary retrospective of a project that only existed on a white board somewhere. The video had its premiere at the Steelcase Annual Meeting and was a huge hit!
And I nearly spent my entire directing fee on a Steelcase Leap Lounger Coach Leather Edition with a matching Ottoman/ Laptop conversion desk. Thankfully Mark talked me off the ledge of blowing all my money on hip, expensive SOMA loft furniture. But damn, that was a really nice chair.
John Dilley: My first job for Kontent was a web spot for an Xbox game. We came into the process pretty late, if I recall correctly. No post, just production. The location was almost an impossible find: parking garage, underground but w/ lots of windows; dark but w lots on sunlight; scummy but not grimy or gross. Teri (the best producer in the world) found it in two days – on the same block as the Kontent Post Street office. The boards called for a single take, worm’s eye, as if the camera was sitting on the floor. I was terrified it would be flat and dull (of course, being my first commercial job, you could make the argument I was terrified of everything). Fortunately, the agency agreed to let us shoot most of it handheld instead, which kept things from being too static and flat.
The shoot went off pretty seamlessly & everyone seemed very pleased with the footage. Nonetheless, there was one aspect I still feel bad about. On the day of the shoot, the agency brought in six different sports cars for background. I’m not a big car guy, and really didn’t expect to care too much which one we chose. However, among them was an olive green 1960s-era Mustang, straight out of Bullitt. Ridiculously cool! So when we wound up waiting two-hours while talent got a neck tattoo (another story), the DP and I spent the whole time lobbying the art director to use the muscle car instead of the Corvette that matched the color scheme. Ultimately, our argument came down to “sure it might not fit the brand as well, but the Mustang is just so damn cool…” We used the Corvette. It was probably the right call, but I still have dreams about that Mustang sometimes. *****
When a director undertakes their first professional project, the nerves can overwhelm (lost footage, schedule pressure, lack of shots, decisions that need to made), but in the end lessons are learned, matters fall into place, and lasting memories are made.
-Team |<ontent>
