Liftingfaces

Client
MillerCoors
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi NY
Creative Directors: Ralph Watson, Andy Carrigan
Exec. Producer: Jerry Boyle

Production Company
Michael Schrom & Co.
Director/DP: Michael Schrom
Exec. Producer: Carl Sturges

Post-Production
Ladies & Gentlemen
Creative Director: Ryan Dunn
Exec. Producer: Brendan O’Malley
Design: Shaun Collings, Ryan Dunn
Edit: Ashley Kreamer
Animation/Compositing: Marco Giampaolo, Eric Bauer
Music: Dodos “Visiter”

If you like sports, or if you watch television at night, you may have seen this commercial already. It is an spot I recently completed at my new studio Ladies & Gentlemen, in collaboration with Michael Schrom. The agency approached us with the request to reshoot and rework a concept they had already produced and shelved. Instead of giving their previous commercial a face lift, we asked that we be able to reimagine the whole thing, taking their brief to heart as we came up with a new concept.

Saatchi & Saatchi were very open to the idea, so we presented a new idea, and they loved it.

The concept was actually quite simple: Eschew gimmicky design for straight-up appetite appeal. We were pleased with the results, and so was the client. What separates this commercial (intentionally) from the competition is the risk the agency was willing to take with the music/editorial.

In more conservative hands, we may have ended up with a typical faux-Latin music track somewhere between Macarena and Spice Girls. Instead, our insistence upon keeping an early Dodos track in the mix yielded strong results. It gave us a hazy summer strum to cut to, with crescendos and lulls galore, and also took the beer to a slightly  classier place, something that only amplifies the already tasty close-up beer performance.

After watching the sheer, uncontrollable, unadulterated beauty unfold before your merely mortal eyes, it may surprise you to find out that I have never once sipped a single drop of beer in my life. Scout’s honor.

I’m baaack. Well, at least the lost photographs are. I dug this roll up in my “crap drawer” in my kitchen.

Long Beach (1998)

My wife and I were together for less than six months, but already we had bought our first dog Atticus and moved to Los Angeles. We went there blindly, and rented an apartment in Long Beach sight unseen. Little did we know how painful a commute that would cause for us later.

At any rate, these shots of our late pup Atticus were such a pleasant surprise to find. He was so human, and I mean that in the least cliché way possible. I threw in a cityscape of the Long Beach area for good measure.

This ends the first batch of Lost Film Rolls, another road trip. Fitting right? I’m sure there will be more, but for now, thanks for experiencing these with me.

Road Trip (2001)

So LA was a bust, and we had moved up to San Francisco in 1999. I started a fledgling web design company called Spinalchord, which lasted 9 months before failing (dot com crash). I took a staff job at a mediocre web studio called Thunk Design before realizing I couldn’t really take the web design thing anymore.

My wife found a job listing through the AIGA (one of the few perks she enjoyed at another design company). It appeared I would be designing interfaces for refrigerators or something.

And so it was written: I took the job in Chicago at a motion graphics company called Digital Kitchen (they were just starting up their Chicago office, and I was asked to come on board and help get things going).

These photos cropped up on our journey from San Francisco to Chicago. I have a bunch more, but four landscapes is more than enough to demonstrate my film roll findings.

The forth installment depicts the ones I love the most. My wife Erin, our late pup Atticus, and Chris and Tim, my wife’s parents.

Reedsburg (2005)

In the winter of 2005, we took a trip up to Reedsburg, WI, where my wife’s family had a cabin for many years. Not too far from their cabin is an isolated tree farm, where you can cut down your own Christmas tree. So we did.

It was Atticus’ last outing with us, and a special one at that. So needless to say it was a great surprise to find a roll of hidden gems.

Now I’m going back to the beginning of my relationship with my wife. This is the year we met…

Road Trip (1998)

We packed up our stuff and drove from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. My wife had taken a job as an assistant at House of Usher (commercial director Kinka Usher’s production company). I decided to spend a semester at Otis Parsons.

The trip was just that, a trip. We had a Toyota U-Haul, a run down Chevy Celebrity, and our puppy Atticus. We also had a windshield wiper malfunction in Denver, and got snowed in 45 minutes down the road in the Rocky Mountains (Idaho Springs, CO).

I liked this image pair. Something about looking back, and seeing blackbirds and emptiness. We never did make it back to Minneapolis, not exactly. I wonder if we ever will?

This is the first in a series of five volumes, each revealing a couple images from lost film rolls I have had developed. This is a phenomenon we are all familiar with, but it’s still like Christmas Day when you show up to pick up your developed rolls of film from God-knows-when.

Rome (2002)

Here are a pair of double exposures that cropped up on one of my rolls. The images are of Rome, the city wherein my wife and I were married, which makes it sort of tragic, as these are the only two photos that developed on this roll (the rest came out blank).

I think the film must have gotten caught and stopped advancing. Strangely, I have a vague recollection of this happening, almost seven years ago now.

At least the two that did develop are sort of interesting to look at. Maybe there’s a metaphor in the whole thing, but I’m not caffeinated enough to figure it out.

Here is a music video I co-curated with Bran Dougherty-Johnson from PSST!. We came up with the idea of having 7 teams participate in interpreting sections of the song. The results were unexpected and fun to see come together.

View Quicktime.

A big thanks to all the participants. Here they are, in order of appearance:

Team 1: Ryan Dunn (me)
Team 2: Paul Cayrol
Team 3: Masayoshi Nakamura + Erik Montovano
Team 4: Ryan Rothermel + Thai Tran
Team 5: Jon Saunders + Cary Janks
Team 6: Caroline Attia
Team 7: Bran Dougherty-Johnson

I shot a commercial. It’s on the television in America. Here it is:

And here are some images from the shoot:

(more…)

A book I started, and never finished. I’ll finish it one day. It’s 150 pages complete, though still very first draft-ish. You can view a twenty page sample, if you like.