Film/Branded Ent.


INSPIRED BY DESIGN (Branded Entertainment, 3 min) 2010

Created, produced & directed 3-episode web/mobile series pilot for Kohler, an architecture & design show, designed to appeal to a female skewed, urban, sophisticated, audience (Informed Perfectionists / Expressive Aficionados).  Revealed design through lifestyle, with characters and stories chosen to match brand attributes.  Babelgum’s first foray into branded entertainment.  Project, docs & process now used as case study for all brand outreach and future branded content.

Episodes:

  • “Surf, Live, Paint” (Artist/DJ/Surfer Andrea constructs a home studio in the Hamptons from a shipping container).
  • “A House for Blake” (Music industry exec and single NYC Mom Debbi commissions a modern modular house in the New Jersey forest so her son can run wild)
  • “New gen, Next gen” (Chad teams with architect friend Brian to create a case study, the 100k house, built at the highest ecological levels, with high design, at the lowest cost, for a new type of hip, young consumer).




RADAR (Stylized Documentary, 3 min) 2009

Co-created popular 3-5 min web/mobile series “RADAR”, highly stylized weekly mini documentaries focusing on the cutting edge of storytelling in the digital age, from culture jammers to audiovisual remix to web comics.  Commissioned as original programming for Babelgum.com to launch their iphone app.  Created brand identity & extensive style guides to keep series consistent.  Curated, produced and directed/creative directed 32 episodes / 3 seasons.  Programmed content according to tracked audience commenting and data.  Extended show offline, creating RADAR ‘experience’, an event show-casing the featured talent.  Developed forthcoming RADAR limited edition and pop-up store, plus brand integration pitches.  Nominated for Streamy award, Best Documentary Series 2010.




BULLET FOR YOUR GUN (Drama, 15 min) 2008

Alice thinks she’s met the geek of her dreams until he takes her home to meet his girlfriend. Meanwhile Mark obsesses over younger artists making it while he DJs to empty bars. Amber is the performer who can’t take being on stage anymore; Miranda is the girl everyone wants to be but no one recognises and Sahara is the drug dealer with strict morals. Meanwhile, Maya waits for her star who never shows, Violet realises she has been ‘serially fucking all year’ and Jane meets Andrew/Savannah, the undercover drag queen who shows her how to shine.

Set in 2007’s Shoreditch, East London’s much touted square mile of creativity, Bullet For Your Gun follows the lives of a group of twenty-something locals over one evening; taking an acerbic look at what it’s really like to live, work and party in The Scene.




GETTING SAM (Drama, 15 min) 2008

Lori and Mel are two typical New York City girls, with New York City girl problems.  They meet after an extended break in their friendship to gossip over coffee about the latest developments in their lives.  As the work and dating anecdotes escalate they come to realize that their newfound hope is not what it initially seemed.  Performed as part of Me & Them #2 at Glasslands Gallery, Brooklyn.

Read the Getting Sam script
Watch the actors talk about their characters

Video from Glasslands performance, October 08


THE MAN WHO HUNG HIS CLOTHES IN TREES (Documentary, 25 min) 2004

Bi-polar and homeless, savant Francois Greeff nevertheless wrote and published two books during various stints in psychiatric hospitals, the advances for which (having no bank account) he immediately blew on designer suits (that he hung in a tree whilst sleeping) and a series of teas at The Ritz.  What initially started as a straightforward narrative was eschewed for a less traditional form of authorship due to his media savvy and in response to his comment that he was never “invited in” by those interested in his story, but joined “outside”.  As such I invited him in for a suburban dinner party with my –somewhat fiery and passionate- family and filmed the ensuing epiphanies, fights, tears and revelations as the wine flowed.

Article about Greeff in the UK Sunday Times
A note on process – see below*




THE PERFECT BUBBLE (Conceptual, 5 min) 2004

Three friends attempt to blow ‘the perfect bubble’.  Though a bubble is by definition absolute, is there such a thing as a flawless creation?  Is fulfillment found in result/aesthetic or in the act of doing?  Cut to the Shirelles’ Putty in your Hands (listen to it here).  The color is yet to be removed (cf. Gary Ross’s Pleasantville) to create black and white images but leaving the bubble in bright green, highlighting our helplessness in the paradox of the irrational pursuit of perfection.  Inspired by Man Ray’s The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, a collage of people in the throws of rapture, that Dali accompanied with a call to action for pure imagery – ‘the blind lucidity of desire’.



A HIGHER PLACE (Comedy, 3 min) 2004

Referencing both The Young Ones and Dr Seuss, we follow the morning of a sulky teenage Jesus living in sin (in Finsbury Park, London) with Mary Magdalene, and his scuzzy flatmate.  An all-seeing omnipresent God punishes his son’s acts of Free Will in various ways.  When ‘J’ sneaks a look at the hottie on Page 3 a giant Crayola pencil is hurled from the sky (God likes crosswords).  When he refuses to return home, he is met with a rainstorm that follows him everywhere he goes.  Inspired by a sign outside a dilapidated Streatham church that read ‘Jesus Lives Here’.

Read the A Higher Place script




THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (Drama/Conceptual, 10 min) 2003

A dialogue free film based around the question that the roles of self reference and self reflection play in the process of (re)invention.  A girl sits, confined in a white room, trying to write a script.  Gradually we see her ideas develop through a series of cliché fantasy sequences pasticheing certain genres (thriller, musical, romance).  Eventually she realizes that the film she wants to make is the one that we are seeing as we return to the opening sequence.




MAKING TRACKS (Documentary, 45 min) 1999

In 1989 everyone in my primary school class was asked to write what they wanted to ‘be’ in a decade’s time and seal this secret in an envelope for their future selves.  I found three of these childhood friends on the anniversary of the unveiling and filmed their surprise/sadness on being reminded by their child selves and their original ambitions.

I intercut interviews and current footage of them with footage of us as children, as well as interviewing kids currently at the school.  The film opens as I revisit the rooms where I first learned how to read, write and make friends, accompanied by a voiceover of the headmistress’ speech from our leaving assembly in which she warned us about stepping into the adult world.

-Stills pending-

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* The Man Who Hung His Clothes on Trees – A NOTE ON PROCESS: My Co-Director/Producer and I, Alice De Ville, spent a great deal of time researching the academic and political context of homelessness as well as spending extended time in the community – including going undercover at the South Bank and at guerrilla soup kitchens on the back streets of Victoria.  We realised that it would take months, if not years, to properly ingratiate ourselves to a point of trust to be able to produce a film of adequate honesty working within the traditional remits of this type of factual storytelling.

As such, we went back to the drawing board and chose instead to educate my parents and two younger brothers on the issues we had researched, scenes we had witnessed and Greef’s personal history and made them, a stereotypical family (mimicking the audience watching) the questioners.  We threw out conventional notions of documentary and turned the question round – would you invite a homeless stranger home for dinner?