We made a smokey floaty cloud, found a guru guy, made a fluffy chariot with built in flashing lightning, had actors ride giant green sausages, turned on some wind machines, used a lot of cotton wool balls, and when we mushed it all together and it ended up a bit like this...
Agency: The Martin Agency
DOP: Darran Tiernan
Avoiding the frequent ‘drone porn’ ( maybe we should call it Prone*) edited with a slow motion horse running on a beach, we have seen in many tourist commercials, we were delighted to gently shake up the genre just a little. We wanted to highlight a few of the stories behind some of the less well known spots to visit in ireland .
*We are 'prone' some tasteful drone porn.
Agency: Rothco, Dublin
Art Director: Stephen Rogers
Copywriter: Shane O'Brien
Music: Villagers
This is the first of two commercials we made for Belvita with the lovely Droga5. We filmed in New Orleans, met some great people including a Voodoo psychic called Phil who told us to be very careful while Skydiving and/or in Greece and that we are Lactose intolerant.
Agency: Droga5
Art Director: Devon Hong
Copywriter: Tara Lawall
Executive Creative Director: Kevin Brady
Producer: Anders Hedberg
Production: Fieldtrip / 1stAveMachine
Music: Search Party
Lead Actress: Katie Malia
Defy The Sun. A series of commercials we directed for Banana Boat for Men - JWT, New York. We legged it to Palm Springs to bring the heat for these helpful films for hot men. We just decided right now we will make any commercial for anything or any brand that has the word ‘BANANA’ in the title .
Agency: JWT, NY
Art Director: Billy Faraut
Copywriter: Garth Horn
DOP: Darran Tiernan
Production: Fieldtrip / 1stAveMachine
True Story: We both spent a summer working in a school Uniform Factory in San Francisco in the late 1990’s, and based the ‘measuring the guy for a suit’ scene on that. So this in some ways is some of our most personal work.
One of our favourites, we loved working on these! Great cast and writing from Mark & Paddy and generally lots of freedom made for lots of visual japes and capers. We took the match cut idea to the extreme and wanted folk to notice something different every time
Agency: DDFH&B
Art Director: Mark Shanley
Copywriter: Paddy Treacy
We directed this commercial for Gogurt, through Saatchi & Saatchi, New York. Shot in Mexico in late 2014. We enjoyed a bit too much 'making up' the character of Swordfish Nose, we sent the Agency shit loads of character ideas and totally unnecessary backstories here are a few (please see under commercial).
Directors Note: We got to try on an animatronic Penis during the making of this project. DM us for pics.
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, NYC
Copywriter: Adam Kline
Art Director: Justin Roth
Closest we have gotten to making our Zombie movie so far. On the shoot the stunt zombie Suckers smashed two windscreens and broke 2 cars and did a lot of mouth bleeding, especially Gumsy the bleeding clown who must have had some kind of gingivitis problem.
Agency: Arnold
Creatives: Josh Tetrault & Bill Girouard
"A breakthrough in panda literature"
Noel Fielding
Here is a book Mike co-authored with Panda experts, David O' Doherty and Claudia O' Doherty. It is called 100 Facts about Pandas and contains exactly 100 facts about Pandas. Here is what some the intelligentsia and some of the hoi polloi had to say about it:
"There is nothing my panda and I enjoy more than reading 100 Facts About Pandas"
Jemaine Clement
"Clearly a vital addition to any library"
Creative Review
"100 Facts about Pandas is very probably a book you need to glance through at least twice"
BookMunch
Mike went on to make 100 Facts about Sharks the second book in this extremely noteworthy series.
Below are two films we made to advertise the books:
Our first short film, all shot in one nightmarish day, yikes.
DADDY’s love child Mr Foley wakes up in hospital with a group of sound artists soundtracking his life. This award winning short film and it’s been doing the festival circuit for ages, still going years later. It even won a bunch of big prizes! When it went online it went crazy and was picked up by one of our favourite sites Short Of The Week. In the days since then it has been watched by over 235 thousand people and counting. We are chuffed to bits, it featured as a staff pick on the homepage of Vimeo and many, many other blogs n’ ting. If you watched it – wahoo to you. If you haven’t checked it out you better do so now before the file gets worn out, what? Sure, it’s just over 4 mins long.
He even has his own site too at mrfoley.com.
D.A.D.D.Y finally intercoursed with Mother London to create this series of educational films for the BBAB (British Biscuit Advisory Board) promoting biscuit safety - here are the first four. We were proud to work on these as we have suffered at the chocolatey hands of hazardous biscuits for way, way too long.
Director's note: The BBAB theme tune actually consists of the notes B, B, A, and B. Now listen again.
Two from series of commercials for the Irish National Lottery. Shot on Location in Dublin & the Bahamas.
Director's Note: Enda did the voice of the Parrot, Mike got a haircut from the Parrot.
Agency: DDFH&B
Art Director: Mark Shanley
Copywriter: Paddy Treacy
This one airs every year and lots of Irish folk say this commercial means Christmas for them so, well… that is nice.
Even though we made it in July. Movie Magic, wha?
Agency: Publicis, Dublin
Art Director: Austin Richards
Copywriter: Kris Clarkin
We love Ray Harryhausen, and a while back found a series of fairytales that he animated in the 1940′s using film stock he had acquired cheaply from the American army after the war. The themes of this song strangely brought these back to mind. So basically we acquired a number of the fairytale stories and re-edited them to the track so we had a strange narrative set in this animated fairytale world – a place inhabited by all the classic characters from Little Miss Muffet to Red Riding Hood. Taking the re-edited vintage animations, we then reanimated over these beautiful old stop-motion films, adding some ‘reality’ and some humour, so they lost that innocent feeling and meaning they once had.
A juicy fruit fever dream. We made this with our friends Matty & Emelie aka M&E. Richie from Jape was like a mini John J. Rambo and up for getting pelted all day long. Yes, the fruit hurt but the smelly defrosted peas were the worst. Worth it for the billion views on Youtube, wah?
The Hatch is another short film. We think it’s a Sci-fi. Or Sci-Folk? It was shot over five days on a trawler in West Cork in Ireland a couple of years back. Here is something we wrote about it:
In the summer of 1985 thousands of people across rural Ireland were visiting Marian shrines, some claiming that they saw statues move, or visions, or lights in the sky. The general reasons for this mass phenomenon are unclear. These visits are set against a changing cultural landscape at the time, but that alone does not explain them. We were both under 10 years old during this time and found the idea of moving statues as frightening and intriguing as an episode of the twilight zone. Growing up in rural Ireland you could sneakily watch a pirate VHS of The Fog or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and then turn on the Irish news to see actual coverage of moving statues. It became hard to differentiate between the two. There is something both small and local and bigger and universally mysterious about this period of time.
This feeling and these ideas inspired the story and the look of The Hatch.