Collision

They have shot videos for The Young Knives, Radiohead, Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand and now the Bristolbased directors of Collision are hoping to make waves in advertising.

interning at Bristol production house Bolex Brothers. Hopewell was taking a year out from his animation degree at Newport College of Art and Foley had just finished studying at Hull. They worked together so well that they decided to go into music videos and launched Collision.

Advertising hadn’t really interested them until they started to notice increasingly creative spots. “We spotted sexy ads on TV that were beautifully done, and you could tell there was a strong vision behind it. We thought if people were doing this and buying into it, then there was hope for us and for our vision,” says Hopewell.

Over the past year they’ve made the switch from promos to commercials, having signed with Epoch Films and shot their first two ads. Their first job was a small piece of reverse-time lapse animation for London shopping hotspot Covent Garden. But they’ve already proven a big hit with adland – their second spot, Wall Art, is a big-scale ambitious project for Honda Acura RDX. Filmed in LA, it takes inspiration from the animated graffiti of Blu.

Animated in camera, the spot required the team to paint a large mural for every frame, then whitewash it over to make space for the next. One particularly tricky shot required four and a half days of work for five seconds of film.

And Foley is finding the world of advertising surprisingly freer than music videos. “Because it’s someone else’s job and you’re brought in to bring it to life, the pressure’s off,” he explains. Despite the popular belief – peddled by triphoppers Portishead and TV shows like Skins and Teachers – working out of Bristol isn’t all seaside shenanigans. When they’re not shooting, the art enthusiasts are busy making screen-prints for their offshoot promo poster project Jacknife.

In fact Hopewell and Folley reckon they’ve had to work twice as hard as Soho-based directors to get their commercials career up and running. “The big Bristol cliché is ‘laid-backness’,” muses Hopewell. “We’re all supposed to be chilled out, having a smoke, making an album. But I’ve always been against that, we’ve always gone for it hammer and tongs.”