Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 6: And Now for Something Serious: "March of Dimes"

There was a period before "Bud's Dance" where I seemed to land on the radar enough that I at least got a couple of boards. Up until my full embrace of the comedic "Cloudy Bright" sun over your shoulder esthetic as presented by Kodak on every box of film that they every made I was obsessed by light. Which I suppose I should have been since I was a lighting guy for a decade before my decision to be a director... a decision that understandably nobody concurred with.

But folks at the Coats Agency gave me a chance and I did a few spots for them that all featured what I used to refer to as, "dark, teutonic photography." Basically the idea was to make things as vague and indistinct as possible. I think the inspiration for this look was the work of Matt Mahurin, particularly his video for Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street." In this video there is one shot in particular that continues to haunt me. A hand enters the frame and pulls out a drawer. The hand is extremely over exposed... so over exposed that the grains seems to scattering like sandy particles. Like every thing else in that video it's an amazing shot.

I guess the early photographic work of Edward Stiechen also was an inspiration. I found his dark indistinct shapes to be very, very compelling. My mind could wander in the obscure tonalities and try to distinguish shapes and images. I guess it's sort like when we as children try to see images in the clouds.

I guess in this spot I was trying to realize a pretty misty concept... I was simply trying evoke the magic and wonder of the inception of life. Nothing like biting off more than you could chew.

Having a child of my own I have come to the conclusion that young kids do seem to be close to something that we as adults have lost touch with. Up to around the age of 4 or so Zoe always had lots of imaginary friends. At one point I think there were around 12 in the car with us. The 2 favorites were Rahoo and Raha. Rahoo was always good and Raha could behave pretty badly. Sometimes we would set a place at the table for one or the other or both of them. After awhile I really started to think that maybe they were real. As strange as this sounds it also crossed my mind that maybe all these imaginary friends were entities that Zoe had known when she was on... gulp... the other side. I know it's all a little gooey but looking at this film again and I realize that I was trying to visualize how I felt about the moment that life begins and how it actually might be more of a crossing point.

From a technical point of view all the shots are in camera. We did crazy things like hang the camera on a jib arm the shoot into a mirror that had water running down it then into another mirror looking at various babies who where lying on a big mattress topped turntable which we could rotate. Often we were not looking down but across and shooting into reflections of water which cast on simple foam core panels. We also had a rotatable glass disc mounted in front of the camera. On this disk I had random densities of... vaseline!... which I could rotate in and out of the frame. Since we were always using long lenses the actual goo could never be seen but the images sure could get vague and dreamy.

Again Ray DiCarlo was there. He designed the baby mover, the mirror tricks and the water tanks for projecting ethereal water patterns. I think there we maybe three or four of us on the crew and that it took us around 6 hours to shoot. We also had at least 5 stunt babies all of whom got drunk and made a mess of the waiting room.

The other thing is I can't remember that we had any sort of a pre-production meeting or that I drew any boards what so ever. Ah... those were the days.

Oh the music is by Arvo Part as performed by the Kronos Quartet. Great stuff... so great that it only is on my cut as it was too expensive to acquire for the actual broadcast version. Arvo, Kronos... forgive me I stole your music for my version. Oh and one more thing, we tried to get Blythe Danner to do the voice over. She wouldn't do it.