Into the Library with Jeff Low
Fruit Snacks - Cocoon
This one goes way back. I didn’t totally know what I was doing. I just sort of emoted my way through it and got lucky. I also think the creatives really steered and helped me. It’s pretty bleak and I can see the mistakes, but also it’s one I can’t believe made it past client.
The Guardian - Use in Moderation
This was my first in earnest with David Kolbusz [Orchard CCO - formerly, GS&P, W+K, BBH, Droga5 and more]. It has a super simple structure and is the first thing that came out the other end feeling like 'me'. The whole game for me is to get better at hearing the voice inside me and acting on its behalf. Even if you do that, there is still an ocean of politics and diplomacy to cut through. David and I have a similar voice - or maybe voices - that harmonise, which is why we work together so often I reckon.
This project is also when I was fully tuned into the fact that there isn’t really 'comedy' the way most people think of it in advertising. ‘Visually curated journalism where the facts happen to be funny’ better describes (for me) what actually works in ads that are meant to be funny. I also got to do the music for this one. The temp track was Queens of the Stone Age 'You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire' so I sort of wrote my own three-minute rip-off riff and six seconds of it was needed. The vocal is screaming, 'Take cover here comes the weekend!', courtesy of David.
Kwiff - Caught Glass
When you catch a glass that otherwise would have smashed, it does feel fucking great. You do freeze in that moment of catastrophe avoidance. [It's a] great idea and writing by David Wigglesworth, Ed Redgrave and David Kolbusz. I only made one mistake in this ad. In the pottery scene, it should have been nothing but other glasses he’d made instead of the generic pottery in the background. Another thing about me is that I have way more success and take more pride getting funny results with terrible budgets than with big splashy budgets. This was certainly one of those projects. It’s also why I’m not retired yet.
Barclaycard - The Crystal Barn
I was worried about this one going in. Those are real people (not actors) and that’s a real business. He really looked like he was cast for laughs and like we wanted to tell a 'funny-looking person' joke, and I really did not want to just make fun of his appearance. When I see that done, it always strikes me as very lazy and just a shitty thing to do.
I needed to find a joke that wasn’t making fun of his appearance and went deeper than the words, 'Crystal Barn'. In the edit, the joke became that the store is impossible to find - and that’s a great joke. It emerges out of a sort of fog which is a rare and unusual thing to pull off in an ad. I can usually see the joke coming pretty far out but that joke just sort of 'conjures' in a way I was really pleased with.
I rely heavily on structure and causation, and this one has a lack of that which I found to be sort of refreshing. [It's] a good reminder that one should stay a bit open to editorial connections you can’t see on set. Also, for a bank ad, this is insane. I can’t believe Barclaycard allowed this.
Brewdog - The Planet's Favourite Beer
For this one, I really just wrote a lot of scenes with the team (Sara Sutherland and Ash Hamilton). We’d write scenes and I’d just keep editing the audio version I had on my computer until the music and syncopation made it feel good and funny. The visual style was important too. Not so glossy. More 'Eternal Sunshine' than anything slick or clean.
This one too is a blend of tones that worked out sort of by accident. Conceptually, this piece is funny because we’re poking fun at the characters, but it also has an affection and warmth for the characters that a lot of comedic ad premises can’t support. That cold/warm contrast creates a third frequency that I think gives it more depth than the usual.
This one reminded me that, in comedy, the more specific the writing, the broader the appeal - the broader the writing, the more narrow the appeal. Specificity is funny for reasons Larry David continues to prove to this day.
Fanta - Idiots Are Amazing
This idea was long overdue and when I saw the script, I thought 'holy shit I’ll never get this job!' - then I did. I always secretly made fun of those 'stock' sports ads (Nike) that always won awards and really overstayed their welcome… like mockumentaries did. This idea was a sort of judo move on that overdone ‘everyday athlete’ ad.
Comedically, this is a weird one because you know a joke is coming for such a long time and that’s usually a very bad thing. Finding that balance where the footage holds up enough to not piss the viewer off before it pays out was a bit of a thing to figure out in the edit. It’s a bit of a ‘try and guess what these people are up to' game for the audience. Then, the pay off is that they were up to very stupid things, despite the Nike/Gatorade/Unsung hero treatment we gave them with the lighting and lensing.
The intersection of smart and stupid is often a good place to find funny.
Ocean Spray - Power Your Holidays
This one worked because of the client (Dan Hamilton) accepting and championing that if the people are ‘smiling and dancing’, it will be unwatchable dog shit. They have to be sort of dancing against their own will for it to be anything worth watching. Without Dan protecting us, this would have been a mess. Dan was magic.
Vodafone - Love on the Platform
A weird pick for me, but I was so excited to get to shoot an uncynical, non-sarcastic and truly earnest love scene, just to see what that was like. I loved doing it but unfortunately, I haven’t gotten many calls for this genre since. I will say that for a romantic comedy about cell phone data charges, you will need an actor as skilled as Martin Freeman to pull it off. It was incredible watching him. She was also amazing and gave him lots of room to do his thing… which he needed from her.
I also almost got kicked off set for vaping on that train. That was embarrassing.
Sipsmith - The Official Tennis of Sipsmith Gin
I got a live action script and decided I did not like it after sleeping on it, but had already agreed to write a treatment and felt I owed them at least that for being kind enough to send me the board. I was looking at the swan on the bottle of Sipsmith in a google images search and he sort of looked like something someone on mushrooms would draw, and I felt an urge to hear him speak. I wrote ‘swan should talk about the gin’ on a piece of paper. I wrote up the treatment heavily referencing Wes Anderson, thinking they would never give me the job. They did and then the animators and model builders (Wes Anderson’s actual crew) made me look like an aesthetic genius….which I am not. Wes Anderson is.
PETA - The Octocurse
This is pure Ed Wood - '70s B movie - twilight zone homage. I also got to do the music for this one which is always great fun.
Setapp - Snake
'Casting is directing' is very evident here. Our lead actor deserves a lot of credit. It was just there on the page - a great idea that needed shepherding. David Wigglesworth, Ed Redgrave and David Kolbusz just tried to consider anything that might play as funny and shot it. My personal favourite joke was him answering correctly on the game show with the only sound he could make in his circumstance. This joke is the core joke of all my jokes.
We are all in skull-sized prisons, on a rock hurtling aimlessly through outer space. Everything we do and say can seem impossibly futile. The more you zoom out, the more irrefutable that seems. The more you zoom in on a character, the funnier that context becomes. This is the baseline for all my comedic writing. The fork in the road for me is always: cry forever or find the humour. This is always the place I’m coming from to ensure I’m saying something true and not just putting a red nose on a cat… which is also funny.
Within that there is a life lesson. There is nothing but shrieking horror out there. Zoom in on your life and the people in it or you’re missing the whole universe paradoxically.
