Saatchi New Director Showcase pick teams up with Rehab for "Take Away" TV show
| by: | Jul 8, 2008 |
One of the more eyebrow-raising inclusions in this year's Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase at the Cannes Lions ad fest was independent French filmmaker Vincent Moon, the man behind the popular online concert series, "Take Away Shows". In theory, the 28-year-old Parisian is exactly what a producer is looking for at an ad festival: he's talented, prolific and unsigned. But convincing him to direct a 30-second commercial seems unlikely. Rather, Moon is looking to work with producers online and on his own terms.
"The Saatchi Showcase was totally out of the blue," he says over the phone from Paris. "People are asking me for reels and I'm like, 'I don't have any reel.'"
His "Take Away Shows" started two years ago with the aim to capture indie bands performing live on streets and at ad hoc venues - such as elevators and moving vehicles - in and around Paris. Bored by increasingly marketing-oriented music videos, Moon (whose real name is Mathieu Saura) partnered with French blog site La Blogotheque to showcase his single-take, guerilla-style video clips.
The 'band-to-busker' idea has since become a staple of TV talk shows, from Jimmy Kimmel to the BBC2's Culture Show. Increasingly, musical acts are ditching the studio audience in favor of impromptu, curbside acoustic sets.
Now, Moon has partnered with San Francisco-based production company Rehab for a TV series that he hopes will take "Take Away Show" global. Rehab's relationship with Moon began last fall, when EP Nathan Brown first approached Moon to create original content for Sony Entertainment's online web channel, Crackle.com. During seven days, they shot 65 videos of indie bands performing on the streets of New York's Lower East Side and sold 10 of the clips to Crackle.com.(Rehab licensed the other 55 clips.) Take away sets were also shot during South By Southwest in Austin, including a performance by Kelly Stoltz (pictured).
Though the "authenticity" and simplicity in Moon's work has attracted attention from ad land, he's rebuffed all offers for commercial rep. Brown says they succeeded in working together on the Crackle.com series because he approached Moon to collaborate.
"He probably would never do a 30-second commercial," says Brown. "He's made it very clear to us. We've brought him stuff leaning toward the commercial domain and he's emphatically said no. He's more of an artist than a commercial person. He lets art be art and that works well for what he does, but it's hard to translate... I just said to him, 'let's start working together.' It wasn't me trying to put my goals or aspirations onto him."
Moon has a reputation for being intense. Just talking to him on the phone is an overwhelming experience; his frantic chatter and apologetic digressions seem to indicate a compulsive, scattered personality, but when he's directing an improvised performance, he says, he's completely focused. "I'm so much into my own world, I can't even talk," he explains during the conversation, as a beeping ATM keypad competes with his thick French accent. "I'm sorry, I'm walking - I need to walk to talk."
At a given time, he'll juggle several projects: new episodes of "Take Away Shows", traveling to Israel for a web documentary series on how new technology is being used in development projects for international aid, and music projects for major label acts. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe tapped him to direct a documentary and two interactive websites, including the Ninety Nights project, a series of 90 short video clips the band offered up to fans to remix and mash-up.
The Creative Artist Agency is also packaging a TV series created by Moon and Rehab called Just A Week that will take established musicians to exotic locales around the world to perform with the traditional musicians that have inspired their work.
All of these projects will eventually find their way on to Temporary Areas, the personal website that will house all of his work. Rather than structure the site as a typical artist web page, he plans to format his site as a global map. "[Temporary Areas] will be a map of the world, filled with all my different projects," he says. "My work is usually linked to a specific place, time and people. So I'm trying to make a movie for each country in the world.
"I'm trying to develop a business model for the Internet," he explains. "It could be the opposite of all the TV networks."
