Smith & Foulkes: Double vision

Across three decades of commercial filmmaking, directing duo Smith & Foulkes have built a body of work defined by meticulous craft, visual experimentation and offbeat humour. 

Through their time at Nexus and current production company Riff Raff, the pair have created iconic campaigns for brands including Honda, Coke and Telstra, combining ambitious visuals with charming absurdity and instinctive storytelling. 

Here, Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes talk to Jamie Madge about creative partnerships, evolving technology, and why doing things the hard way still matters.

How did the two of you first meet, and at what point did you realise you had a shared creative language?

AS: We both found ourselves on the animation course at the Royal College of Art, despite having few demonstrable skills as traditional animators. Amongst us all, we would certainly have been voted ‘least likely to have a thirty-year career in character-driven comedy’. We had similar tastes, well, half similar, the other half wildly different, which is a fairly healthy balance for any successful partnership. So it seemed like a no-brainer for us to work together.

AF: I knew when I saw Alan cutting out hundreds of photos and flicking bleach over them with a toothbrush that we would get on.

You both came from illustration and design backgrounds rather than traditional film routes. What initially drew you towards animation as a medium?

AS: Neither of us grew up as your typical comic-book geek. I was more into the cut-and-paste graphic collages of David Carson. But I still wanted to tell stories, and we both saw how animation could do this in new and unexpected ways, combining visual experimentation with a sense of theatricality and humour. It’s also the perfect medium for a pair of obsessive control freaks, even if the technology at that time was not quite up to our ambitions.

I knew when I saw Alan cutting out hundreds of photos and flicking bleach over them with a toothbrush that we would get on.

AF: I actually went to Farnham and did a BA in animation, but it wasn’t until I went to the RCA that I really started to experiment with different techniques. At that time Channel 4 were commissioning some really interesting, different stuff and MTV started to try new things in animation too. It felt like it didn’t need to just be cartoons; animation could be used to deal with serious, dramatic storylines as well as humorous ones.

Above: Smith & Foulkes expand Telstra’s Wherever We Go universe as zombies, gnomes, skeletons and a host of other characters fall into step.

Were there particular films, artists, animators or directors that shaped that sensibility early on?

AS: I was really into freeform abstract riffing to music tracks, filmmakers like Robert Breer, Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger, then taking the spirit of their patterns of movement into a Carson collage. But after a while this felt like a bit of a dead end, trying and failing to communicate ideas within an intense, overpowering visual mash-up.

Then we both got into The Simpsons. I realised I was spending a year making a visually elaborate film about the perils of gambling dependency that nobody understood, then Homer comes along and sums up the same subject with one killer line and a shrug. And it was funny. Watching that show evolve from a fairly hit-or-miss slapstick gagfest into one of the greatest commentaries on the absurdities of modern life taught us the importance of writing, character development and storyboarding to get our ideas across. And I guess, at heart, we both just love a bit of silliness.

I guess, at heart, we both just love a bit of silliness.

Our obsession with choreography moved away from abstract shapes towards characters and their relationship with the camera, although we were more likely to be found watching 1970s ITV wrestling than hanging out at Sadler’s Wells. The instinctive comic interplay of great double acts like Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, the slapstick situationism of Buster Keaton, the inventive staging of Busby Berkeley musicals, and the patterns of human movement in the groundbreaking independent film Koyaanisqatsi all shaped our work. But not just comedy capers. Michael Dudok de Wit could create devastating emotion from a character standing completely still.

AF: I loved the work of Run Wrake, who was at the RCA before us. I saw his film Anyway and it blew me away. It was like a moving pop-art, Dada explosion and really engaging. He also used a Curtis Mayfield track, which I thought was really cool. We managed to tempt him to college to do a few tutorial sessions. When we worked on the visuals for the U2 PopMart tour, they asked him to do the Lichtenstein and Keith Haring sections, which looked amazing.

A lot of your most celebrated work, for Honda, Coke and, more recently, Telstra, feels handcrafted and deeply authored. How do you maintain that sense of personality and craft within commercial work?

AS: Unlike a lot of directors working in animation, we’ve never been defined by the way we draw. So we’ve had the freedom to visually experiment to find the right technique that fits each story. It’s only now we can look back and recognise the recurring threads that go through all our work, based around choreography and flow, with unexpected transitions and a deadpan sense of humour. It’s handy to have an almost obsessional attention to detail, seeing where we can add that little extra something, and learning when not to. Years ago, a project of ours was described as stylish but silly. High praise indeed.

AF: We’re very hands-on! We also love getting a script that has a good core idea but has room for us to bring something to it, making sure that it’s gettable and that we’re not sucked into trying to show everything all at once.

As a directing duo, how does the collaboration actually work creatively? Have you naturally developed different roles over time, or do you approach projects as a single voice?

AS: We try to be two versions of a single voice. Somebody has to make the first suggestion, then the other can refine and elevate the idea, putting an unexpected twist on it. We’ve learned never to be precious with our initial ideas, creating a safe space for (occasionally) random thoughts, without (too much) judgement. If we like each other’s ideas, there’s a good chance others will too. It’s healthy to let go of your ego when it comes to ideas, and we genuinely can’t remember who came up with what, because it just doesn’t matter.

We try to be two versions of a single voice.

AF: The great thing is that we are different. If we just did the same thing it would be pretty boring. I seem to gravitate towards characters and Alan seems to go more towards environments, but we don’t have any rules.

Have there been moments where being a duo has allowed you to push ideas further than you might have individually?

AS: Every time. It’s liberating to suggest anything that springs to mind and reassuring to know there’s someone else to make it better. It makes the process a lot more fun for us. I honestly don’t know how single directors stay sane.

Above: Smith & Foulkes’ legendary Honda film, Grrr, transforms the arrival of a cleaner diesel engine into a gloriously surreal animated world.

Your work has always played with the surreal. Have you ever had ideas that went a bit too far for brands?

AS: We’d probably claim that we play with the absurd rather than the surreal. Usually, we’re sent scripts from like-minded creatives (and clients) who understand our humour and appreciate what we can bring to their story. We’ve been fortunate to work on some pretty out-there ideas over the years. A Renault script about decapitated drivers replacing their heads with comical objects springs to mind. Those were the days. And we never thought we’d get zombies into the Telstra spot but the client was well up for it. We did once pitch a log flume idea for a toilet paper spot. Sadly, it went down the drain.

AF: On Honda Grrr we did have an idea for a bunch of statues peeing on the old engine as it went past. The visual looked great but sadly Honda didn’t think so.

One element that’s consistent through your work is impressive world-building. What do you think makes an invented world feel ‘alive’?

AS: We try not to randomly invent worlds for the sake of it. They must be grounded in some sort of subverted reality. Magic realism, or maybe logical fantasy, keeps the audience connected to the story, without them having to work too hard to get what the hell is going on. We learnt early on with NatWest Escape that the film had to represent genuine aeroplane emergency escape graphics rather than our reinvented version of them, in order for the subversive nature of the humour to hit home.

Magic realism, or maybe logical fantasy, keeps the audience connected to the story, without them having to work too hard to get what the hell is going on.

It’s good to start with some sort of equation. For example, for Honda Grrr we landed on a parade of brutally optimistic Chinese Communist Party propaganda animals inhabiting the obsessively manicured Augusta National golf course, seen through the eyes of Liberace. Which just seemed to make sense. We do this as much for our benefit as the audience.

Humour in your work often comes from tone and visual contrast rather than punchlines. How carefully calibrated is comedy within your films?

AS: We have a healthy appreciation of the absurd. And sign us up for a bit of pompous majesty. You only have to study how a gag like Stonehenge in This Is Spinal Tap is masterfully constructed. The characters come first, revealing their interrelationships and the exact situation they are in, so that you understand their intentions before the pompous absurdity of the payoff. Genius.

A lot of our comedy involves moments of non-acting, the pauses, the anticipation, then the payoff that might be just the merest bemused blink. We also try to capture what we call the comedy of atmosphere, which really means putting characters into extreme and often ridiculous environments, then seeing what happens. We would love to do more punchline comedy but, in commercials, it’s very rare to see a really funny dialogue-driven script written for animation. And the ones you do see are always given to live-action comedy directors.

You’ve worked through huge technological shifts. Which developments genuinely expanded creative possibilities, and which have risked flattening originality?

AS: It’s been staggering to witness the developments in tech of the last 30 years. Back in the day it was difficult to fully execute all our ideas, which forced us to be creative with photocopies and glue sticks, often drawing and printing directly onto film. I once spent three days bleaching out photographs to create a three-second shot, and another two days in bed being violently sick from inhaling the bleach fumes. We could do that scene in half an hour in After Effects now, without the fumes.

We have a healthy appreciation of the absurd.

Photoshop and After Effects have obviously been liberating, but you’ve still got to have the ideas in the first place. Image searches certainly helped us expand our initial thought process without needing to trawl through the local library or spend a small fortune developing reference shots at Snappy Snaps. We would have loved to have access to the limitless possibilities of 3D software back in college, but in a way we were lucky to develop as directors first. We could then gradually expand the work through different techniques as new technology became available. You should never fear new ways of doing things, and you get to collaborate with amazing talent who can show you what is possible.

New technologies now allow smaller teams to create increasingly ambitious imagery. Do you think that democratisation is exciting, or does it risk losing some of the craft and experimentation that defined earlier eras?

AS: There’s no point dwelling too much on the good old days. Tech is here to stay and we must embrace it. I can’t see a downside to being able to envision your ideas more quickly; you get instant results and can either rethink or move on. Which allows us to push things further. The only problem is the options are now limitless, but I guess it’s our job to know which is the right one.