Top animation director: Stuart White
In our regular column Campaign Brief Asia is turning the spotlight on a hot director working in Asia. Here, we talk to Stuart White, CG supervisor and animation director of Fin Design + Effects.
White (left) has proven to be a valuable creative mind in the world of animation, vfx, and emerging technologies. One who welcomes a challenge, but always finds the means to the end of beautiful execution. His latest accomplishment in directing the recent Lenovo ThinkPad animation for the Asia market is a lustful combination of his technological and creative fused skills. Previously, White also co-directed the campaign for the full CG animated paper world of Challenger. And he partnered in the creation of the Cannes acclaimed Virtual Reality Experience for NRMA- Crash Test.
How did you get your start in the industry?
I’ve always been a massive fan of computer graphics, and played with it at home as a hobby since the days when CG was done in black and white (sad but true!). When I managed to get a career started, I worked my way up through the ranks of the camera department from clapper loader to focus puller to camera operator. One day the DOP I was working with happened to mention he worked at a company that had a 3d program called Softimage running on a Silicon Graphics machine. This was the year that Jurrasic Park came out, and that was the gear that it was created on. Well, I made him regret telling me that! I hounded him on the phone for months before he finally broke down and gave me a job working in his motion control studio.
What was your first big break as a CG supervisor?
I landed a job doing Softimage in a two person team under a guy called Scotty Wilcox. He was the guru of that program – when the Softimage technical support people had a problem they called Scotty to tell them how to work around it. So learning 3d under his wing was my first real break. When he left a few years later, I inherited a pretty happening department from him and I was off and away doing some great ads for some very talented directors.
What are your favourite three commercials of all time?
Locally it’s the Yellow Pages ad with the punchline “Not. Happy. Jan”. Superbly conceived and executed, it has literally become part of our language and not many ads can claim that.
The Sony Bravia spot with the millions of coloured balls bouncing down the hill is beautiful.
Frank Budgen’s ad for the Playstation 2 where people form a massive mountain in the middle of a city is pretty awesome too, but it has taken on a whole new complexion since the movie World War Z came out!
What do you love about supervising commercials? Tell me about your most recent job and what was involved/the challenges of the job, and why you like commercial work?
Commercials really press my buttons creatively. They come along in rapid succession and each one has a completely unique set of technical and storytelling challenges. Some agencies are really looking for a creative partner in us and that’s the situation that really gets me fired up. I love that feeling when an idea has been born, but it’s still trying to find its fullest expression. That’s when you can really pick up the ball and run with it. That was certainly the case on our recent job for Lenovo where the agency creative Kevin Ng and I really gelled, and every bit of effort that was spent on that job went straight into making great images on screen without mucking around.
What appeals to you about working in the Asian market?
The freshness, the diversity, the energy. The feeling that everything is possible. Some parts of Asia are really becoming a nexus where influences and styles from all over the globe can be thrown into the mix to create something vibrant and new. Because of that spirit, I feel a creative connection to somewhere like Shanghai even though I am based in Sydney and with the opening of Fin Design+Effects Shanghai in September it will become that more accessible.
What’s the three most memorable spots you’ve supervised? Why?
Number one is easy! Dulux “Ghost”. We needed an abandoned mansion as a setting, and the production company found the most amazing location. It was basically the White House, built and abandoned in a forest in Ukraine. Head past Chernobyl, turn right, and head across the steppes towards the Russian border for a few hours until you get to a town where nothing has changed since 1951. We were doing 18 hour days and the local crew were up drinking vodka for the other 6. Totally surreal.
Another director needed me to shoot some timelapse footage for him while he was off shooting the rest of the car ad. So I brought along my cameras, they pointed to the summit of one of the most beautiful mountains in New Zealand and said “Go up there for 3 days and shoot anything beautiful that happens”. Talk about heaven!
The third would be the trio of Challenger spots we did in CG in the style of stop motion animation. I really took great pride in co-directing them and doing the virtual cinematography. Fantastic client, great agency and total creative freedom. A real pleasure that resulted in three ads I’m sure I’ll still be proud of in ten years time.
Tell me something about yourself that not many people would know.
I am one of Australia’s foremost authorities on Neenish Tarts. I have sampled them all across this great country over a period of decades and can say with some conviction that the Lawson Pie Shop in the Blue mountains makes the best.
What aspect(s) of CG/animation/ digital worlds are you most passionate about?
There are two threads that run through everything that I do behind a computer. One is cinematography, I love the process of crafting of a great image and I care about it deeply. But the other passion overrides the first, and that is storytelling. What use is a pretty picture if it is just distracting you from the message? Telling a story in 30 seconds to me is a great challenge, like Haiku poetry. I see these ads winning awards and they go for four minutes some of them. It drives me nuts. Any monkey can tell a story if they can have four minutes. But to tell a story in 30 seconds, now that is something that takes focus and discipline from every person in the creative chain.
What are you most excited for in regards to contemporary technological advances? And how do you see these technologies best being utilized in the world of advertising media?
These days I live eat and breathe virtual reality. I just took a week off work. What did I do with it? Learn to program in a games engine so I can make virtual reality content. I need some mental help, I really do. It was sunny outside too! But seriously, we are seeing the birth of a whole new medium right now. Nobody really knows the rules of VR, they are being written in the forums of the internet as we speak. It will probably take another 3-5 years for the technology to percolate through to the mainstream, but as it does, how can you resist exploring a medium where literally anything is possible?
What’s the craziest project you could dream up you’d love to explore?
Virtual tourism makes my mind explode. In one morning you could summit Everest, fly a wingsuit through the streets of Chicago and take out pole position at the Monaco Grand Prix. And that’s just changing geographic location. How about being a tourist in time and watching Neil Armstrong step onto the moon from the vantage point of Buzz Aldrin? Creating content like this is a natural evolution for a VFX supervisor and keeps me as excited now as the day I got my first computer.
Previous directors featured in this Top Director series:
1 Comment
Talented artist!