Angelo Cerisara takes a leap forward

Small towns have a gravity of their own, and they can be hard places to get out of. You need propulsion, and enough fuel. 

For the young, London-based-Italian-born director, Angelo Cerisara, it was the running, leaping, jumping art of parkour that got him moving over the rooftops of Schio in northern Italy, and out towards the world of sets, screens, shoots and finding out what a first AD was on your first day as a director. 

I can’t do [parkour] anymore. And I was not even so good – that’s why I was filming other people.

Now based in Bermondsey, south east London, where he’s lived for the past four years, Cerisara charts his journey from teenage parkour runner to signing for representation with Hamlet - with whom he made the award-winning Missed You Stranger - via a party in Brussels, and spending his pandemic shooting spots in Russia, Lebanon and Egypt. 

Above: Cerisara's campaign for radio station StuBru, which won him the New Director of the Year awards at the shots Awards EMEA in November 2021. 

None of Cerisara's family had any connection to cinema, but it was his immersion in the world of parkour that put a camera in his hand, or rather, his mouth. “I was in a freestyle association, a club called Krap,” he says, “and we were doing these big parkour events, and that’s how I started using cameras," he explains. "We had so many athletes coming from all over the world in our little space there, and YouTube was exploding, and there had to be someone who made the videos. I was 15, learning how to use a camera, how to shoot things.” 

When I made parkour videos, I had to edit them to make them interesting, to find new kinds of edit tricks and camera movements. It’s the same now with commercials.

He learnt fast. When he got his hands on a GoPro, he knew what to do with it. “We had the GoPro between our teeth,” he says. “On the head it’s not so stable, but if you keep it between your lips, your neck is way more stable.” With that, he was up and running, and one of his teenage parkour pieces, Run, is still on his Vimeo channel. “I can’t do that anymore,” he laughs. “And I was not even so good – that’s why I was filming other people. I wasn’t good enough to be filmed. So, that’s how I learnt, and how I got inside the world of shooting.” 

It was parkour that provided Cerisara’s exit visa and papers of transit, and parkour – shooting on the run, editing for biggest impact – exerts its athletic influence on the roving, fluid spots with which he’s making his name for the likes of Uber, Nike and Levi’s. “You always have to adapt to what’s happening,” he says, reckoning parkour’s biggest influence us in the edit. “When I made parkour videos, I had to edit them to make them interesting, to find new kinds of edit tricks and camera movements to break on YouTube eight years ago. It’s the same now with commercials, because everyone wants the new camera movement, the new edit tricks. Commercials is everything about recognising trends. It’s about identifying them and not being sucked in by them, so you do something a bit different from the trend.

Above: Cerisara’s parkour video, Run.

His focus on scouting the right kind of location – the industrial background for Nike Women comes to mind – is proof, too, of his parkour legacy again playing a strong supporting role. “The Nike Women location was where I used to train in Milan,” he says. “I was visiting those places because of parkour, and I knew those industrial landscapes because of that. In parkour, wherever you walk, you look for where you can train – 40 per cent of it is location scouting. You need to find where’s safe, and each film has its own location that speaks. Because I don’t use a long lens, and I go wide, the location is a very important part of the frame, it’s not just a blurred background. It’s very much part of it. I choose them with gut feeling.” 

You can spend 60 per cent of your time on set explaining what you want to do to the client. The clearer it is at the beginning, the more you can shoot on set.

The real action takes place, he says, in the edit. “It’s a lot more important than the shoot. Usually, when I shoot, I am already thinking about how to edit it. I do a lot of prep, and I storyboard a lot. I love storyboarding. Visualising the film before arriving on set is so important. You need to be 100 per cent sure everything is working, and the process of drawing things is very helpful to understand when you’re wrong.” It works, he says, not only creatively, but it makes good business sense too. “You can spend 60 per cent of your time on set explaining what you want to do to the client. The clearer it is at the beginning, the more you can shoot on set.”

Above: Cerisara’s work for Nike Women uses location to play a strong role, something he developed in his time making parkour videos.

When it came to Missed You Stranger, the imperative was getting that tongue-lashing intro right (take 30 was the keeper). “The casting was done by licking apples,” he recalls. “It was fun. You have two people kissing, they don’t know each other, they’ve never met before.” To get his leads in the zone, he used a touch of manipulation. “I picked the girl out and said, 'you need to help me because this guy is freaking out'. And then I picked the boy and I said exactly the same thing. So, the two tried to help, because they’d been told that the other one was not so willing.” They ended up doing 30 takes. “And 30 takes of people kissing... that’s a lot of takes. But the more we shot that scene the better it was.”

It’s very easy to understand what you don’t like, but understanding what you like, as a director, that’s the most difficult thing.

The end result netted not only the shots New Director award, but gave him the confidence that he was on the right track. “I love the Miss You Stranger one,” he says, “I feel like that’s really me.” He points to the Hold On music video he made last year for Italian artist Not Waving (shot in Ukraine) as what he’d like to do more of. “It’s very lo-fi, nothing really happens, but it was narrative, and how we worked it out, we spent four days with the actors, setting up who they are, and on set we weren’t even telling them how to feel – they were that character – and everything was amazing. They weren’t acting, they had become those people and, after the shoot, they were still those people. There was no difference between shooting and not shooting. I felt I was filming a part of who you actually are, and that felt so good.”