Hasta La Ideas

Twenty teams competed over the weekend to make a 60-second cinema ad for the ICA in just one day. Lucky Team 13 were the winners

The 24 Hour Ad Challenge was organised by M&C Saatchi and HypTV, based on the 24 hour film challenge concept by ‘guerrilla’ filmmaker Johnnie Oddball.

At 10am on Saturday, twenty teams of young creatives and filmmakers, gathered at M&C. There, the brief was revealed – they were asked to make an ad promoting the ICA, based on the idea of ‘now’. All the films had to be delivered to the ICA at 10am the next day where they would be screened for the judges and all the entrants. Here’s the winner…

Director: Martin Stirling
Producer: Michelle Craig
Creatives: Sam Norton, Ricky Diaghe
Production Coordinator – David Bridle
Editor – Alex Burt
Editor – Bejan Emamalizadeh
Camera – James Karinejad

Martin and Michelle explain how they came up with the idea: “We arrived with The Staring Man idea about 12 hours in. We were really dissatisfied
with the ideas we had started out with; high concept ideas felt like they came across as too gimmicky and the others relied on narration which risked being too explanatory, we felt that this didn’t quite fit with what we understood of the ICA.

“Our approach was informed by the type of work presented at the ICA in which patience always seems to be rewarded. We wanted to keep action to a minimum, to try and achieve confidence in stillness.

“We had a number of actors on stand by but decided on James Sobol Kelly because he has such expressive features. Ironically, the only direction we gave him was to hold his breath and watch for 60 seconds.

“We were pretty influenced by the work of Edward Hopper, whose work seemed to capture moments in time through simplicity.”

The judges – and I was one, alongside Alan Yentob, Peter Saville, Sophie Fiennes and Graham Fink – immediately felt that this was the stand-out entry. As Saville said, it understood that a gallery is about looking and seeing and felt appropriate for the ICA where it will now run as a trailer to the cinema programme.

For me personally, too many of the entries were couched in the cliched ad language so familiar to us from commercials. Many could have been ads for mobile phone companies or banks – urging us to live for the now and be all we can be. Team 13’s was brave and bold and simple. Interestingly, they do not come from a typical ad background, Stirling and Craig having met at the National Youth Theatre. They are about to start a production company called Shoot! with Barney Girling.

Congratulations to Team 13 and all the entrants – just getting something shot, edited and delivered in such a tight timeframe was a feat in itself.

To see more of the entries go here