Seen and noted

This week's guest comments are from Jason Levine (Art Director/Writer), Publicis, New York, one of the creatives on this week's featured spots for the Manhattan Short Film Festival.


The Manhattan Short Film Festival was started by an eccentric Australian friend of ours called Nick Mason. The first screening took place on the side of a truck in Mulberry Street, Little Italy, on Sept 27 1998. In its first year the festival received 316 entries from 16 countries, with the winner coming from the former Yugoslavia.

The following year, the festival relocated to Union Square Park, in the heart of downtown Manhattan, and was judged by Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Eric Stolz, Laura Linney and Roger Corman. Last year the festival received a record 621 entries from 32 countries, and handed the judging to the cinema going public in 7 states. The winner, an Indian film called Little Terrorist, went on to be nominated for an Oscar.

In 2005, the festival will be judged by the public in 30 states in 48 cities, culminating in 160 screenings during one week, 16th – 24th September. The winner will be announced in Union Square Park, Sunday 25th and will receive backing to create a feature film that will be distributed to the same cinemas.

So that’s what the festival is about, now about the ad campaign.

My partner, Eric Quennoy, and I were having a late night conversation with the founder of the MSFF, Nick Mason, when he asked us if we would be interested in helping him market the festival for him. We obviously saw a great opportunity to do award winning ads for a film literate client and good friend, and jumped on it.

After a few weeks of struggle we came up with an idea of creating films that were inherently short, with story lines that had absolutely nowhere to go. The first one we thought of was “Memoirs of a Kamikaze Pilot”. Soon, we had written a dozen of them: Searching For Starbucks, Exit Strategy for Iraq, The Calf That Would Be Veal, The Dog That Wandered Into The Vietnamese Restaurant, Jimmy’s First Time, The Softer Side of Idi Amin, Grandma’s Surprise Party, The Man Who Thought He Could Fly, etc.

As far as execution goes, the idea was to make every one of these ads look and feel like a short film, and therefore to incorporate as many of its genres – animation, film noir, documentary, etc. And just like the films in a short film festival, we wanted all these ads to look and feel radically different from one another. The starting point was to actually use a different director for each spot, and for them to bring their unique style to the board. Some directors decided to shoot on 35mm, some with an old Bolex H16 camera, some went digital, and some of the spots are animated. Also, the ads were shot in locations as diverse as London, L.A, New York, Montevideo and Sao Paulo.

It’s also worth noting that when we sent these scripts to directors, we were worried about them all gravitating to the same two or three boards. To our relief, however, the directors seemed to find something different in each script that appealed to them as filmmakers.
As we begin to see some of the finished ads, it is amazing to see how different the spots look and feel from each other, which is exactly what we had hoped for.

The truly refreshing aspect of this project has been the passion and generosity shown by so many people. A short film, as everybody knows, is about the struggling filmmaker pulling favors at every turn with the vain hope of one day achieving a slither of notoriety. This clearly seemed to appeal to the countless directors, producers, editors, cameramen, sound mixers, etc, who happily gave their time to work on the project.