I direct a lot of TV commercials and music videos.
I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.
When I moved to New York I started to do a lot of TV commercials. It just kind of naturally evolved from still photography to commercials.
I made a living for 10 years making very typical TV commercials. But I always wanted to reach beyond that and do stuff that people might relate to in the way they relate to my nonbranded content.
Like so many people, I only remembered Orson Welles as this huge, fat, bearded figure selling wine in TV commercials. So whenever anyone said I looked like Orson Welles I said that I wasn't that fat, and I would get on a diet, quickly.
Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
If you're advertising on Facebook, the work you're doing should be made better by being on Facebook. You can't just be repurposing old TV commercials and hoping to get traction; that's very primitive. The question, always, is, 'How is this idea made better by this medium?'
I did my own music videos, my own TV commercials.
Although the TV commercials will try and have you believe otherwise, there is nothing good about breakfast cereal. No matter how 'low fat' or 'high in fibre' the box tells you it is, ditching the high sugar cereals is the first step you need to take towards a better breakfast.
At its best, MTV puts a face to the names, if you know what I mean. I think if you can take the expression of a song much farther, that's great. And it's one of the only outlets there is for artistic filmmaking. But it's a double-edged sword. At it's worst, MTV is just a lot of TV commercials for songs.
