Brian Belefant

I was a math major in college, and frankly, not a very promising one. Remember the distributive property? Where a(b + c) = ab + ac? I didn’t get it––I mean truly get it––until I was in Calculus VI.One day I was talking to a girl on campus who told me she was majoring in advertising and light bulb went off. Suddenly I knew with absolute clarity the thing I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to create communications. Turns out I had an aptitude. The first assignment in my first advertising class was to come up with an ad for a national student advertising contest. I won first prize, which got me an internship at a New York advertising agency. And that was the beginning of my real education. I quickly figured out that I wanted to work for Ed McCabe, who was then––and is still––considered one of the greatest copywriters in advertising history.  With a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, I got Ed to hire me. McCabe gave me a tremendous foundation in verbal … read morecommunication, but after a couple of years I had an epiphany: That as much as people could be compelled by persuasive writing, our society was becoming more visual. In advertising, this was nowhere more apparent than in the work being done for Nike, California Cooler, Apple Computer, and Porsche—all of which was being created in California, at an ad agency called Chiat/Day.Suddenly, I had to start over.It took me almost a year, but I finally got a job at Chiat/Day, working for Lee Clow, the greatest art director of all time.I think of Scali, McCabe, Sloves as my undergraduate education and Chiat/Day as my graduate school. I learned more than I dreamed I could have at that agency, and when two of Chiat’s luminaries left start their own agency, they chose me—of all the insanely talented people working there—to build it with them.But after working for them for a couple of years, I had another epiphany: That as much as people could be compelled by persuasive writing and evocative visuals, our society was losing patience with the very paradigm that advertising represented. People wanted to be entertained.Again, I had to start over. I could have tried to move into Hollywood, but I had become a pretty big name in advertising and besides, there was one agency that was creating entertainment as advertising: BBDO in New York. They were breaking every rule I’d learned at Chiat/Day and Scali, McCabe, Sloves, and along the way they were creating amazing work for Pepsi. It wasn’t long before I was Senior Vice President/Creative Director at BBDO, creating national and international advertising campaigns for Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Visa, Skippy, and a couple of other brands you may be familiar with. But what made the position particularly attractive to me was the perk: The agency agreed to send me to film school. At NYU.After a couple of years, I put together a reel that got me represented as a commercial director by a national production company. What’s nice about directing commercials is that the work is sporadic, but it pays quite well. So I had time to pursue my own projects, and money to throw at them. In addition to the hundreds of commercials I directed, I wrote, produced, and directed several short films, the most ambitious of which was called ‘Burning Passion’. In its rough cut form the film played in more than two dozen film festivals, where it won three Gold Awards, two Audience Awards, three Screenwriting Awards, and a Best Directorial Debut. I had written more than a dozen feature scripts and was about to pull the trigger on one of them when I had another epiphany: That our society was no longer satisfied with good writing, evocative visuals, and entertaining story lines. People want communication that feels—is—authentic. And once again, I had to start over. I scrapped the scripts I’d written—even though they had become increasingly better-written, more visually interesting, and more entertaining—and began looking for a way to tap into what was fundamentally me. By a stroke of good fortune, I was cleaned out by a business manager I’d considered a friend. I no longer had the resources to gild an otherwise inauthentic existence with fancy cars, expensive clothes, and exotic vacations and had to confront myself every moment of every day. I found myself getting back in touch with the fundamentals I’d learned years before. I wrote—not with the hope of making a sale but for the pure cathartic experience of writing. I got deep into photography, developing a unique photographic technique which, by the way, earned me the title of Photographer of the Year by the International Color Awards in 2006. Most propitiously, I had two kids. Children who depend on me for every aspect of their existence and for whom I don’t just want, but need to be absolutely, completely, utterly authentic. I have come to the point where I have both the skills and the perspective to create pieces that are both meaningful and entertaining. I hope you agree.
read less...