Mikko's 'Monsters' Hops to Great Guns

Mikko and Kojo Bring Sauna International
Into the Great Guns Fold
 
The director of the "Fragile Monsters" PSA for Havas in Finland and his EP
broaden their relationship with the global production company brand.
 

Dad turns into a ghastly rabbit in Mikko's viral hit "Monsters" for Fragile Childhood.

Director Mikko Lehtinen and Executive Producer Kojo Abban, founding partners of the UK-based production company Sauna International, are bringing their boutique production outfit into the global production house Great Guns.  The reciprocal arrangement will see both companies representing each other's interests in their respected territories. Mikko will also be exclusively represented as a director by Great Guns in the UK, the US and in Asia.
 
This marks a return to the Great Guns fold for Kojo (both talents tend to go by their first names), as prior to building Sauna with Mikko he'd worked at Great Guns for over a decade.
 
Laura Gregory, Founder and Managing Director of Great Guns, is excited by his return. "Kojo was a key member of our team for nearly 12 years, so it's great to have him return to us in this way, bringing with him such a terrific company that he and Mikko have built and grown together."
 
"It seemed like the right time for us to expand our focus into the wider marketplace", adds Kojo "and partnering with Great Guns was obviously a total no brainer for us." Mikko is no less enthused. "Let's get shooting!" he adds with a grin.
 
He's got plenty of reasons to smile.  He's currently riding a wave of global publicity following the wildly successful viral launch of his Fragile Childhood "Monsters" PSA, produced for Havas in Helsinki (formerly Euro RSCG). Fragile Childhood is a Finnish nonprofit founded in 1986 that aims to help children who have suffered at the hands of parents' alcohol abuse. Less than two weeks after the riveting spot launched it had racked up over 1.6 million YouTube hits and made news around the world. CNN featured a six-minute report about it, Fast Company and Adweek covered it in the States and the Huffington Post called it "the creepiest PSA ever." Writing in Rolling Stone, critic Joe Berkovitz added, "The 'Monsters' ad takes a cinematic approach that would do John Carpenter proud."

Mikko says he took care to get the right performance out of the kids in the spot. 

The spot aims to stop parents from being drunk around their children. The kids seen in the ad all stare bleakly, in various modes of coping. As the soundtrack build, viewers realize that the same monsters that haunted their dreams as children – zombies, beasts, scary clowns – turn out to be how kids can see their parents when they're under the influence of alcohol.  Heightening the fear factor in the spot is that it appears that the kids are the only ones that can see these creatures. The copy at the end of the ad says, "How do our children see us when we've been drinking?"
 
"When I got the script I knew that it would make some noise, but I'm a bit overwhelmed that it became so huge," says Mikko.  "A PSA from Finland makes news all over the world, from Australia to Peru.CNN showed the whole ad and talked about it for a further five minutes, with a live interview from Finland. Who would have guessed that? One evening I was lying on my couch watching TV and suddenly it came out of BBC 3!
 
"The point is that seeing your guardian – someone you trust, who you look up to – changing into something else is very unsettling," the director continues.  "Seen from a child's perspective, their whole personality changes. He's not the mother or father you knew anymore, but something else."
 
The spot was shot in Ljubljana, Slovenia in collaboration with Grilli Films and Studio Arkadena. Mikko pointed out, while the budget was very low, the fact that the crew worked for very little "is a testament to the fact that money isn't everything. In fact, I've never ever had such a motivated crew.  Everyone considered the subject important and the script brilliant, and they gave 110 percent.
 
Producer Hana Kovic from Studio Arkadena adds; "When I saw this I knew we had to do it, even though financially it didn't make any sense for us. I've been interviewed on live TV and some of the major Slovenian politicians are now using it to promote their own views on alcohol abuse. It's great that an advert we service-produced for Finland has become news and a powerful political tool in our own country."

A little girl shows her unease at being seen with her drunken father.

The performances of the kids in the "Monsters" PSA have been praised in almost every write up on the spot. Mikko says he worked hard with his creative team to find children with the right temperament to handle an assignment like this.
 
"I especially asked the casting director to find the thoughtful, shy, reserved, melancholic types," he points out. "For this project, I instructed the crew that the kids must never see the monsters before we started shooting. We rehearsed the shot with my assistant director, a lovely approachable girl, playing the adults' parts. And once everything was set, then we rolled the camera and replaced the AD with the monster. And the kids went like, 'what the?' The first take was always the best."

Published 10 October, 2012