Extra Salt & Sauce

I got invited to judge The Sharks International Awards in September in Kinsale. I turned it down at first because it fell in the week of my wife’s 50th birthday. But in mid-refusal I changed my mind. It dawned on me that Kinsale would be the ideal place to have a long weekend of birthday celebrations. Luckily, the missis agreed and the day after the judging ended my whole family came across.

Although the organisers have speakers from the world of advertising like John Hegarty for example, they also do one very smart thing: they invite a speaker from outside the business too.

This year they excelled themselves by inviting Mike Scully, the Executive Producer of The Simpsons and his wife Julie Thacker, a very funny writer in her own right, with stuff like The Golden Girls to her credit.

Late on the Thursday night, Mike and Julie joined us for dinner straight off the plane. The pair of them were jet-lagged and Julie had a chest cold but they joined in the chat and got stuck in like the rest of us to John Hegarty’s very fine self-cultivated “Hegarty’s Red”.

Mike was slightly alarmed to learn that he was billed to address his audience of hungover media whores for two hours, not the easy one hour he had in his head. As it turned out on the day in Kinsale’s ancient town hall, we could have listened to him for six hours. He was effortlessly funny and informative. He talked without notes and answered every question he was asked with great generosity. He was a lot funnier than most stand-ups.

For example, he started out by asking to be interviewed. My own son Olly stuck his hand in the air and ended up on stage in a chair facing Mike, Parkinson-style. Mike had pre-scripted the questions so he could milk them for laughs (“So Mike, tell me about your heroin and crack addictions?”)

What followed was Scully’s life story, laced with off the cuff gags and spiced up with behind-the-scenes stories about The Simpsons.

He was born into a blue-collar family in Springfield, Massachussets. Mealtimes were colourful: “My father was the only man who could work the word ‘cocksucker’ into grace.”

He moved to California where he sold jokes to stand-ups. He was jobless for six months and his wife left him – “so it wasn’t all bad”. His second wife Julie coaxed him into joining The Simpsons.

It takes 20 people 9 months to make one Simpsons show and there have been 400 to date. They try to get away with murder but US laws on TV censorship have tightened up since Janet Jackson’s live nipple exposé during the Superbowl and they can’t show Homer’s butt crack any more.

Someone in the audience asked about product placement. Scully says a lot of advertisers make approaches but it can backfire on them. Like when they worked the brand Breath Assure into the script of a show and Homer asked: “Hey Marge, did you hear that Breath Assure causes cancer?”

Someone else asked if there had been times when they turned down stars’ requests to be in the show. Scully said if he had his way Madonna would never get on: “If ever I want a sour-faced bitch, I’ll go somewhere else!” Al Gore got invited on but declined. When he came back later during his presidential campaign he was told: “No, sorry, you had your chance.”

Anyway, you get the picture. The two hours whizzed by and soon enough I was back here at my screen in Leith looking at an e-mail from the Scully man himself. He asked me to send him a few Leith ads “because I hate to miss a good joke”. So I sent a bunch of stuff down the interwebtube. Here’s what he saw: Electric Lady Carling Crab Pintlings Irn-Bru ‘Baby’ and Leith Xmas viral and here’s what he said:

"Hey Gerry,

Mike"
Later on, I sent him our most recent Irn-Bru ad. This One and this is what he said:

"Hey Gerry,

Happy Holidays,
Mike"

So it’s official; we’re funny. Coming from Mike Scully, that really means something.

Picture the scene.

It’s early November. You’re in a meeting for something completely unrelated to Christmas, and out of nowhere your brain suddenly decides to come up with an idea for a slightly different kind of Christmas card.

After all, as everyone’s been saying since the birth of little baby Internet, the good old paper Christmas card is dead.

So why not build a website, fill it with festive films made specially by Leith Agency staff, and then send it to our clients, contractors and friends?

And why not call it YuleTube?

And why not do the whole thing in three weeks?

Yes, why not indeed? This is The Leith Agency, where’s no such thing as a problem, only a challenge, as Grant always says.

Well, never ones to shirk a challenge, we sent a brief out to the whole agency, asking everyone to send in their ideas. Five days later, a bumper sack worthy of Mister Claus himself was opened on the boardroom table and a mighty feast of judging took place in order to pick the films that would be made.

There were rude ones, cute ones, funny ones, impossible-to-make ones… ones from the studio team, ones from production, ones from finance, ones from IT, ones from the TV department, ones from planning, ones from creative. Hell, there were even ones from account management.

But there was only one week to get everything filmed and only agency staff to do it, so victors there had to be, and a select band of ideas was picked.

Cameras were purloined. Golf flags were borrowed. Sprouts were smacked. Nuts were cracked. Guitars were thrashed. Legal advice was taken. A logo was created. And films were made.

To cap it all off, our friends at Blonde Digital built a site more than worthy of the effort everyone had put in to making everything happen.

Thank you to everyone involved, as well as to the five thousand people who visited.

And an especially big festive hug to Mister U. Tube of Googleland for not suing us.

Mwah.

Rich The Tat, Leith’s celebrated tattoo artist is scrolling the word ‘diarrhoea’ onto someone’s hand. Next to him another man is having his arm shaved. A third bloke with strange writing on the palms of his hands is being fed a banana by a girl with feathers in her hair.

We’re on a Scottish Executive film shoot making an ad to promote ‘Hand Hygiene’. They reckon something like 80% of all infections from ‘flu to MRSA are spread by hand. The very thought of this has acted subliminally on the entire creative team and ever since we got briefed we’ve found ourselves feverishly washing our hands at every opportunity, like mad Lady McBeth.

I’ve just been speculating to our client Trish Quinn that the finished ad when broadcast will trigger a national outbreak of obsessive compulsive disorder. She tells me there have been serious discussions about this already.

Meanwhile our Head of TV Les Watt, having guzzled down his microwaved porridge like Daddy Bear, is contemplating a snooze on the sofa in front of the sofa. We’re worried he won’t wake up till spring. The eskimoes have something like 47 different words for ‘snow’. Les has almost as many euphemisms for a sneaky snooze. Last time he called it “a long blink”. Today, he says “ I’m just recce-ing the insides of my eyelids.” There is a framed picture on Les’s wall containing a montage of, oh, sixty photos of Les slumbering at shoots all over the world.

Finally, the camera turns over. The amount of kit they need to film a bloke washing his hands is staggering. We’ve got four hand models – chaps with well-manicured cuticles and names like ‘Geraldo’. We also have three wash-hand basins. The camera needs to get in really tight as if it’s actually in the sink. So we have one basin bisected across its length and another bisected across width – on yeah and one intact basin. The art director briefed a stonemason to do the needful with his big angle-grinder. When she came back, the guy had cut one basin into four quarters. Words were exchanged. Mainly sweary-words. The poor guy had to start all over again.

The lighting cameraman, D.O.P., call him what you will, is using a Fraser lens for these basin interiors. It costs a bomb to rent and there are only two of them in the UK. They’re specially designed to squeeze into tight close-ups and keep all the detail. Which probably means most of the world’s supply of Fraser lenses are beavering away on porn shoots in the seamier quarters of downtown Los Angeles.

Here in downtown Leith we’re working ourselves into a lather with plain soap and water.

Later in post, we’ll be correcting the colour of the ink, animating the ink in the sink to give it a slightly evil quality and adding a soundtrack of effects and explanatory voiceover.

Here’s the finished film, finally.

Let us know what you think and after you’ve watched it, please wash your hands.

The Agency was the main sponsor of the Film Strand of Leith Festival (www.leithfestival.com) this year. As part of this, we set up and ran a Short Film Competition which culminated last Friday night in an Awards presentation to the winners.

We had 9 finalists and we decided to award two prizes on the night. First prize went to David Hutchinson, a local Leith man who submitted “Carousel”. We also awarded a special prize to Callum Bird Neilson, a local 10 year old who put together “Star Wars IV – A New Morning”.

But many thanks to all the budding film producers who took part and made the evening such a great success.

We were also delighted to introduce Jason Stone of David Reviews (www.davidreviews.com) to the Festival this year as a guest speaker. Jason spoke initially about short film-making in general and then proceeded to take the audience on a retrospective journey through the last year’s most recognisable ads.

He was accompanied on stage for this by a Panel comprising of Simon Mallinson of MTP, Gerry Farrell of The Leith Agency and Rory Rooney, Director - and a very interesting Q&A session ensued between Jason, the Panel and the audience.

The evening continued into the “wee small hours” on the top deck of Cruz and a good night was had by all – at least that’s how it felt the next morning!

For the Stagecoach shoot done with Farm we filled up a bus with crashtest dummies and drove it around the countryside. At one spot the coach stopped and a random punter got on. And then got off (fairly quickly)

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