shots Awards 2015: Branded Content of the Year

Following our coverage of the shots Awards 2015 in the last issue, here, in round two, we speak to several more gold winners – including editor Joe Guest, the team behind The Unquiet Film Series and folk from Blink and Psyop – about working with dogs and penguins and what gives their work that gilded glow

 Branded Content of the Year: The Times/The Sunday Times, The Art Of Satire

You were involved with ongoing campaign, The Unquiet Film Series, from the start. Can you tell us about its inception/what the client wanted and the initial thinking behind the campaign?

Phil Lind [creative director of The Unquiet Film Series] News UK wanted to exploit the archives that The Times and Sunday Times had kept for over 200 years to help drive subscriptions. [Former deputy ECD] Dave Monk and his team at Grey London helped devise The Unquiet Film Series with Nick Stringer at News UK.

News UK had set an ambitious timeline for 10 films to be made for the series. They wanted the films to feel as diverse as the stories from the actual archives. Once they’d settled on the titles of the films they needed makers of short films to write scripts and treatments for the film titles.

Nick, a former 4Creative colleague, contacted me in Feb 2014 and asked if I could help. I said definitely, as it sounded really exciting, especially given that we would have access to the amazing archive.

Directors were asked to pitch on the film titles. Over 25 directors were approached and we received a breathtaking array of ideas. From the pitches Dave, Nick and I proposed the shortlist and the final decisions of the selected directors were made by John Witherow, the editor of The Times, and Martin Ivens the editor of The Sunday Times. With no production facility within News UK at the time, I proposed Peter Maynard from Betsy Works, another ex-4Creative producer, to produce the films.

There have been a number of different films about different people/aspects of The Times/Sunday Times. How do you choose who and what to cover and how much freedom was there in terms of the direction and how you interpreted the idea?

Liz Unna [director] The themes best expressed the core values of the papers throughout their history. There was complete freedom, except of course for the budgets, which were small. I was drawn to the theme of Bringing The World To Britain [shots Awards 2014 Branded Content of the Year winner], about The Sunday Times’ commitment to foreign correspondents, basically because I am a huge fan of war journalist Christina Lamb.

I was also drawn to the theme in The Power Of Words, about how writers use words to change the world, even in small ways, and to spread ideas and change perceptions. My treatment was built around a Caitlin Moran interview. So I made those two and then pitched on two more, The Art Of Satire and another one yet to be released called A Duty To The Unheard.

For The Art Of Satire, how did you decide to approach what is, essentially, the pretty solitary process of one man creating an illustration?

Liz Unna: I wanted this film to get inside Peter Brookes’ head and to really understand his process, from initial idea through to execution, which all happens over the course of a work day.

Every day of every working week. It sort of blows your mind when you think about what he does, and how lonely a process it is really. He’s a team of one, no one can help him out when he’s stuck for an idea.

When I initially met Peter he was sort of reluctant to have a film made about him as there had been attempts before that hadn’t really worked and his schedule is so demanding he didn’t want a film crew following him around all day. It’s stressful enough without having to be ‘creative’ on demand in front of a camera.

So, we shot early one morning, before his work began, and recreated the arc of a day unfolding. I also wanted to get other people to talk about the importance of his work and contextualise it, as Brookes is rather self-deprecating.

I also really wanted to use sound design to help viewers get inside Brookes’ brain. External noise drops away for him as he starts to de-focus his mind and then he needs absolute silence to work.

Other sounds become heightened, like the scratching of his pen and the scraping of his pencil. Composer Lennert Busch created an unusual and experimental soundscape for the film.

One of the Awards judges referred to the film as “a standout example of this type of content”. Why do you think this series has been so successful?

Liz Unna: The Unquiet Film Series was the brainchild of Nick Stringer. He realised he was sitting on a goldmine, a huge treasure trove of untold stories about the many brilliant, committed journalists and editors at The Times and The Sunday Times.

The team was super-clever about brand representation, and thank God we never had to fight about putting more ‘product’ in. Nick was clear from the start that when the papers were mentioned they had to be motivated by the story, never gratuitous or fawning, otherwise the films would fail. Having a client and agency who have the trust and balls to let you get on with it is massively beneficial.

In The Art Of Satire, Jon Snow spoke about how Brookes’ work at The Times tends to go against the line of the paper, and the fact that they value him so highly is a credit to the paper itself. That is all you need to say. I didn’t have to ask Brookes about how he feels about his editors or The Times or have him say how awesome it is – he would have been uncomfortable doing that and it would have felt set up.

Another thing that really worked on this series was the process. There was huge respect and space for the directors to develop their vision. We would have incredibly detailed PPMs and go through all questions, shooting style, shot-list etc, but client and agency didn’t attend the shoots.

Much of my job is about helping people feel comfortable on camera and drawing out their stories. My interviews ramble sometimes and feel more like conversations. When there are a lot of people listening in, people get self-conscious, like they’re supposed to say things a certain way, or ‘deliver’. At the risk of sounding like a hippy, I think people respond to the energy in the room. 

What was the hardest part of putting this film together?

Liz Unna The hardest thing was cutting it down. We all worried that people have teeny attention spans so kept trying to make the films shorter. That said, mine are all pretty long so maybe that’s changing?

No one seems to quite know the science of it. There was so much to say and so many funny contributors, it was tricky to know what to lose. I know that’s a good place to be in but it was so hard. I was in New Mexico and my incredible editor, Alex Lea, was in London for the second half of the edit. We’d send cuts and notes back and forth until we both were happy. It took a while but we got there.

You won this category last year for Bringing The World To Britain. What does it feel like to win another shots Award?

Liz Unna We all loved making these films so much; we had such a great team of people, a dream-team really, plus the most fascinating subjects.

We of course had no idea how well they’d be received, especially as some of them are kind of nerdy and long. So, yeah, the recognition and awards have been very, very cool. The shots Awards two years in a row are the bee’s knees and beautifully bookend the journey these films have been on.