Commercial Collage Kristinha McCort Millimeter 2001

Millimeter, May 1, 2001

Commercial Collage

Kristinha McCort

It isn't every day that a commercial represents the talents of one A-list feature-film director, much less twelve. However, “Magician's Magic,” a spot for French outdoor advertiser JC DeCaux (out of Publicis WAM, Paris) does just that. David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Figgis, Wim Wenders, and Spike Lee, among others, each directed a seven-second vignette showing a JC DeCaux advertisement imbedded within a major metropolis at dawn. Joanna Bongiovanni, executive producer at Santa Monica-based Cielo Films, had the challenge of organizing many of these directors, along with Claire Barnier of Paris-based Premiere Heure.

“Several things were unusual on this project,” notes Bongiovanni. “First, the caliber of the directors and that they had a lot of creative freedom within certain restrictions. It had to be seven seconds long, it had to be at dawn, and they had to choose an advertising site in their city that was available. JC kept changing the sites, so their location selection had to be tempered by the client, which is not common. But all of them were extremely excited about the discipline in finding a little story or vignette that could be done in such a short amount of time.”

Producers only had a few weeks to organize the 12 shoots across the globe, and no one could shoot simultaneously. During this stressful time, Bongiovanni relied heavily on e-mail communications with Barnier in France and the directors worldwide. “Rather than get up in 3AM to call Singapore, I would send an e-mail at the end of the night and then get up extremely early,” she notes. “It was a tremendous logistic challenge. We weren't sending back and forth moving footage, but we were sending pictures of the various installations in the cities so that we could approve them and offer them to the directors. E-mail made the job possible.”

The result is an elegant spot that conveys remarkable depth and variety of artistic vision. Lynch, for example, combined still images with footage of a Los Angeles skyline, positing a six-foot tall shopping directory as a monolithic entity. Figgis, the only director who shot DV, reveals a woman waking in London against a billboard background. And Spike Lee, who filmed in New York, delivers a moving sequence in which a grandfather and granddaughter perform Tai-Chi in front of a JFK terminal ad that reads “Family.”

“No one had an overview outside of the parameters of the concept, but I think it came together really well,” reflects Bongiovanni. “It was brave of the agency to take this under their wing.”