How to Direct Children’s Ads with Stash Capar
“Every kids spot I’ve shot, whether for the US, Canada, Western Europe or South East Asia, has the same feeling of timeless childhood nostalgia. I think that’s really why I get hired, to capture the warm feelings one gets when we recall our fondest childhood memories and milestones.”
Stash Capar is a director at Yonder, and someone who has won and directed a number of ads that work with, and speak to, children and families, forging something of a specialism in this area. After recently becoming a father, he discusses the art of ‘the kids spot’ with LBB’s Ben Conway - revealing his directorial approach with children on set, what makes ‘bad’ kids advertising and applying his own learnings to his new journey into fatherhood.
When pitching to agencies for a children’s spot, Stash calls his approach ‘reality +1’ or ‘cinematic realism’. He says, “It’s a more beautiful and cinematic version of reality where morning light is always peeking into a warm, lived-in kitchen, and little bits of cute, colourful kids’ clutter are sprinkled around.” The core of this approach, he explains, is to allow the children to get lost in their own worlds - “not ‘acting’ as much as they are just there” - and capturing a more organic “special moment” as a result.
This makes casting and location more important than ever. “If we cast the wrong kid, we’re f*cked. If we choose the wrong location, that feeling of timeless childhood nostalgia will struggle to materialise.”
But for Stash, truly bad kids advertising falls into one of two categories. Firstly, the spots that feel random and unplanned. This happens when a director takes on a project and fails to control the children - or believes that directing children is an impossibility. “It’s putting the kids in charge and calling it ‘real’ or ‘documentary style’... You end up with a sizzle reel that lacks any sort of coherent messaging.”
The second category is the spots that are overly saccharine and therefore fall flat emotionally. These are defined by forced, unnatural performances from the kids and a “sterile, fake-feeling world,” says Stash. “If there’s an emotional or humorous moment, we are usually led to it by overbearing music, as opposed to landing on it naturally. Sometimes a director will compensate for the poor performances and lifelessness with technically impressive visuals, but everyone who sees it knows the truth - you don’t feel anything while watching it. Completely forgettable.”
To avoid both of these pitfalls, the director says that you have to genuinely love working with kids and understand that the child will ultimately make or break the film. “They are the most important part, not the lens selection or some other technical detail. As the director, it’s your job to guide them.”
He continues, “You can’t direct kids the way you direct adults. It requires a completely different approach. In my experience, kids respond best when there’s a one-on-one relationship with the director and a fun ‘game’ or competitive element built into the direction they are given. I’m almost always rolling 50/50 and just guiding (some may call it tricking) them into the performance we’re looking for. It should feel like the child ‘discovered’ it - like it was their idea all along.”
Comparing it to the experience of being a parent, he says that it’s important to find a balance between offering no guidance at all and the equally damaging impact of micro-managing every step of the process. “The general idea seems to be low-key control of a situation without making it a point that you’re ‘in charge’.”
For those interested in learning to direct kids, Stash advises that there’s no substitute for the experience of being around children and parents in a leadership role. He shares that working with children in athletics and martial arts for nearly a decade gave him an informal but intuitive education in child (and parent) psychology. Then, a few years into his professional directing career, he made the switch to focus on kids spots, debuting his ‘timeless childhood nostalgia’ approach with a spot for SpaceX that went viral and opened more opportunities in this specialism.
However, for those without their own children, or with little experience around children, Stash also suggests that delving into your own childhood for simple, relatable memories is a good place to start. “I spent my early childhood in a refugee camp yet I had the same milestones as the kid in the suburbs,” he says. “We both had to learn to walk, we both ran to our parents for comfort, we both remember our first friend. These things are timeless and universal, with only the outermost layer of ethnicity, fashion, socio-economic status and the like changing. The main ‘feeling’ remains the same.”
In his experience, this is what brands are looking for in children's advertising - someone who can understand and capture those honest moments.
Some recent projects that Stash explored this sense of ‘timeless childhood nostalgia’ with include campaigns for Kemps, MadeGood, Gerber and Lysol. Differentiating each piece with a nuanced layer of the modern world on top, he says that each piece is about “synergising” the contemporary with the timeless. Gerber, for example, wanted its Hispanic and Latino American audience to be reflected prominently, while MadeGood wanted to show contemporary situations in which a healthy kids snack might be found - while keeping the warm nostalgic visual style. Meanwhile, the Lysol project had to navigate the representation of covid regulations while still providing a ‘back-to-school’ excitement. The Kemps project is the most recent and was a “great collab” between the director’s friends, old and new - Yonder in the States and Stash’s Canadian post regulars Upstate, Alter Ego and Timeline.
“From the very beginning it was about falling back on the style I knew would work well, while being very attentive to the specific asks coming from agency and client,” he says. “The opening shot was very important to them, as was unveiling the delicious although unusual product (smooth cottage cheese?) in the most appealing way possible.”
On these campaigns, and indeed, on all kids spots, Stash says that most major shoot-ruining problems can be filtered out during the casting process. However, he adds that “something small will always go wrong on shoot day”.
“On MadeGood, one of the kids hated the taste of the product. She ended up being the kid who gave us the absolute best performance, it just took us 36 takes to get there. On Lysol, I had a child who wouldn’t wear a mask and kept ‘trolling’ the AD as well as his own parents. Luckily he liked the director. On Kemps, we decided to swap out leads on shoot day. This was a first! But it ended up being a great thing.”
He continues, “All of these situations were good reminders of just how important it is to have layers of contingencies and backup plans when shooting with kids as something will go wrong. The ability and courage to improvise and come up with solutions on the fly is key too. A great producer is very helpful in this.”
But in the end, all the pre-production prep work and on-set setbacks seem worth it when Stash finally finds ‘the take’. Usually coming from an improvised idea during filming, or from giving a child new direction, he says these moments of magic are the most fulfilling aspect of working on kids spots. “I know it’s a game changer when I can see the child’s face light up, as if they know exactly what I’m describing. We roll and a minute later you hear laughter or an ‘awww’ coming from video village. That’s the moment I love most.”
After working on these children-oriented projects for many years, the director says that agencies and clients tend to assume that he has had kids himself, after seeing how well he works with them on set. However, while Stash has been a coach and instructor to children in the past (through martial arts for instance), fatherhood is something that has only recently become a lived experience for him. His first child, Maya, was born in January this year - already earning herself an acting credit in one of her father’s films - “she was perfect and needed no direction,” he jokes. So how will directing his own little actor influence his work? And how will his kids spot experience shape his approach to parenthood? We’ll have to wait and see!
“Everything seems to be inverted for me in that I’ll be taking the lessons I’ve learnt as a coach/film director, and applying them to being a father, as opposed to the other way around. I’ll let you guys know how it’s going in a few years’ time!”
