greg_harrison

How An SF Subculture Birthed A Cult Classic Film

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:59:25 GMT

By Dan Gentile

The seminal San Francisco rave film “Groove” starts with a party promoter laying out the ethos behind throwing an underground event: “Remember, no obstacles, only challenges.” The same could be true for the film’s production, a DIY affair that overcame disasters ranging from firing its star on Day 1 to a literal earthquake, and featured the type of naivete that could come only from a group of first-time filmmakers.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with two screenings at the Vogue Theater this weekend, the film chronicles one night in San Francisco’s underground dance music scene, as party promoters take over an abandoned warehouse for a night of drug-fueled debauchery. Writer and director Greg Harrison was a product of the rave scene himself, finding his first housing in the city via the SF Raves email list and moving into an in-law unit sight unseen in Noe Valley based on its reputation as a party spot.

“I found the world so fascinating and the people so fascinating. It was this kind of post-hippie San Francisco idealism merged with new tech and new music, but most importantly, a creative scene — just people wanting to make and create. As a filmmaker, that energy was infectious,” Harrison told SFGATE. Harrison has gone on to work on advertising campaigns for the likes of HBO and Netflix.

The film features all the hallmarks of a classic San Francisco rave. The promoters break into an empty warehouse, create a second location that people travel to in order to learn the actual address of the party, and ward off a raid by the cops (the officer is played by a young Nick Offerman). David, played by Hamish Linklater, is the newbie to the scene riding a roller coaster of his first trip on ecstasy, being guided by a cast of more experienced ravers.

“You would come into the rave scene, and you’d have elders who would kind of take you under their wing, show you the ropes, watch out for you and take care of you,” DJ Forest Green told SFGATE. Green, who still DJs in the Bay Area, was living in a rave warehouse in East Oakland and met the crew when they were scouting it as a location. She ended up as one of the several real-life DJs performing in the film, which included Dmitri from the Lower Haight (pictured on the iconic poster holding a disco ball) and house legend John Digweed. The soundtrack is a time capsule of the scene, with tracks from locals like DJ Garth & ETI and household names like Orbital.

“A lot of the actors were staying on my floor. We used our cars as picture cars. We used clothes from our friends. It was a real family affair,” said producer Danielle Renfrew Behrens, who most recently worked as co-executive producer on the show “Poker Face.”

The DIY nature of filmmaking also applied to fundraising. With a goal of $250,000, Behrens and Harrison sought out money from unconventional sources. Two-thirds of the money came from people under 30 who had made their money in the dot-com boom, sometimes in increments as small as $5,000.

“The cool thing about the raves in the ’90s was that they were all intertwined with tech, with the tech creators out here — they were raving, and they were writing code,” said Green, citing the SF Raves message board as a pivotal rallying tool.

“When we sold the movie for 60% profit at Sundance within a year of people investing, they were like, ‘We love independent film investing, it’s so less volatile than the tech market,’” Harrison said. “And we were like, ‘You have no idea how lucky we just got.’”

Filming took place locally, and back then, the options were much more plentiful than today, with the same derelict buildings that sparked underground parties coming in handy for filming. “Could you imagine now having multiple empty warehouses on the water to pick from?” Behrens asked.

They settled on a building at Pier 1 along the Embarcadero, which came with just the type of lived-in charm that they needed.

“It was completely trashed … When we talked to the city, they were going to clean it up, but we had to make an emergency call to say, ‘Don’t touch anything! Leave it all,’” said Harrison, who added that it had just the type of industrial grit they needed. The warehouse also afforded enough space for offices and wardrobes, but in a freak natural disaster, an earthquake on the second day of production ended up shattering the second-floor glass windows.

That came after a Day 1 dilemma in which the most well-known actor in the film came into shooting with a toxic attitude that could’ve compromised the vibe of the production. “I saw the six years of me trying to make this movie slip through my hands,” Harrison said. They ended up dismissing the actor and promoting a member of the supporting cast, which the crew took as a reminder to make decisions with their gut.

Once a rough cut of the film was completed, they sent a version to Sundance on VHS and were accepted into the 2000 edition of the festival, leading to an acquisition by Sony for $1.5 million and a limited theatrical release in June of that year. It came on the heels of two other rave-related films released in the year prior: “Go” and “Human Traffic.”

The film has aged surprisingly well over the years, and it genuinely still feels like the document of a burgeoning scene as captured by participants rather than outsiders, created with the same ethos that fueled the parties.

“There was a certain idealism and naivety that was also represented in the rave scene that was required to make independent film,” Harrison said.

On its release, there was some backlash from ravers averse to bringing their culture mainstream, but as for DJ Forest Green, she just had one complaint.

“I only have one pet peeve with the film, and that was when they were ending the night, they didn’t leave the room spotlessly clean, because we always did. We always left things better than we found them.”

HGTV: Together We Make It Home

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 06:04:45 GMT

By Tim Nudd

Read on AdAge | Watch launch spot

HGTV steps back from its daily business of chronicling the buying, selling and renovating of houses to explore the deeper meaning that homes hold in a new spot marking the network’s 30th anniversary.

The 60-second spot, created by agency MOCEAN, follows a young family that moves into a house and makes it their own over the course of several decades—before selling and turning the place over to another young family. There is no dialogue in the ad, which relies instead on the unspoken truths about time passing—and lives lived—within the same four walls.

The spot, which will premiere this Sunday (Aug. 31) on CBS’s “Big Brother” broadcast, is the first branded HGTV spot in over a year. The tagline is, “Together, we make it home.”

“HGTV has long delivered audiences amazing home transformations and inspiring renovations that entertain,” said Lauren Burack, SVP of marketing at HGTV. “We wanted this spot to evoke a deeper connection to our viewers and the homes and home stories that they live and breathe every day.”

“HGTV is a brand that serves to inspire personal connections to a home—honoring this space as both a beautiful structure and a functional place to grow throughout all chapters in life’s story. This was our North Star in developing the creative for this campaign,” said Greg Harrison, chief creative officer at MOCEAN.

That goal led to an emotion-driven script and naturalistic production design, said Olivia York, associate creative director at MOCEAN. “Spanning over three decades—the same timeline as HGTV’s existence—viewers are able to picture themselves within each room and meaningful vignette, proving that every home is unique but the emotional attachment to its importance is universal,” she said.

The team designed the room aesthetics of each era to reflect styles from the ’90s to today, allowing the home’s structural development to mirror the changes and growth of the family within, York added. With the final tagline, “we knew that viewers would understand this as a reflection of their own lived experience, while nodding to HGTV’s support in defining what home means to each of its beloved viewers,” she said.

Finding Joy with Greg Harrison

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 15:28:19 GMT

By Dave Schuman

View on YouTube

It's the 25th Anniversary of writer/director Greg Harrison's rave movie Groove ! Greg talks with host Dave Schuman all about how the film came to be, his struggles as a first-time director, landing Nick Offerman in an early role, getting into the Sundance Film Festival and having to fire someone on the first day of filming.

PART I: MAKING GROOVE

PART II: LIFE AFTER GROOVE

Get Into the Groove: The Best Party Film You Haven’t Heard Of

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:03:35 GMT

By Adesola Thomas

Read on Letterboxd

In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Adesola Thomas dives deep into the euphoric appreciation of the rave scene as captured in director Greg Harrison’s Groove .

Sometimes the petite grief of knowing I’ll never see every movie I might love surfaces. But that lamentation dissolves when I remember the equal and opposite truth: For all of us, any day now, something alchemical will transpire. Maybe at your local cinema or in your living room, you’ll watch a film for the first time and it will stay with you forever.

For me this film is Groove , Greg Harrison’s outstanding and criminally underappreciated San Francisco–set rave picture, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last month. I discovered the Sony Pictures Classics title when sifting through the ‘party’ category on Tubi one evening a few years back. Ten minutes into the feature’s sleek 86-minute runtime, I knew. And not simply because Hamish Linklater spent the majority of his debut big-screen performance in a partially unbuttoned oversized shirt. Although as Maya remarks, “Did anyone else enjoy Hamish Linklater’s open shirt? I thought Hamish Linklater’s open shirt was lovely.”

Groove opens on a motley crew of cigarette-smoking rave collective members, clandestinely finalizing party logistics in an abandoned warehouse garage the night before a renegade. Crouched over building blueprints, they discuss the proximity of the map point to a local police precinct from which Sergeant Channahon (baby-faced Nick Offerman), unbeknownst to them, will ultimately crash their party. They then decide what time they’ll zhuzh up the space with water bottles, video art and a free fruit spread.

Before launching into a quintessentially new millennia opening title sequence outfitted with dial-up and floppy disks, cinematographer Matthew Irving pushes in on rave collective leader Ernie (Steve Van Wormer), who declares to his peers debonairly that there are “no obstacles … only challenges.” It’s the clever type of dialogue that does the dual work of launching us into this subcultural world while demystifying what kind of elusive bodies plan secret parties. These are no boogeymen. They’re metropolitan kids who want to find somewhere illegal (re: intriguing) to dance to electronic music. My, do they dance.

Harrison peppers the film with sweat-soaked dance sequences where people move their bodies with abandon. Characters in Groove earnestly move, often beneath mesmerizing cerulean and blood-orange gel lights. The aura of the film, especially on the dance floor, is visually kindred to the otherworldly technicolor California of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere , the concluding chapter of his teen apocalypse trilogy. Connie agrees, citing Groove as, “Nowhere without Araki.” Rachel True even appears in both films. In Nowhere she’s Mel, our brooding protagonist’s bisexual girlfriend who flits around LA with her lesbian lover, Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson). In Groove she’s Beth, a former babysitter and seasoned raver whom we follow among a cast of characters.

Groove foregoes the self-referential cheek of party subculture movies like 24 Hour Party People and the boyish debauchery of a Project X . Harrison’s youth-culture rave picture captures the affinity people experience at underground parties. He shot the film in San Francisco in 24 days, maintaining his vision of a ‘celebration of scene’ he intended for Groove , as opposed to the drug-induced, teen shoot-’em-up that the LA producers to whom he first pitched the idea wanted it to be.

When Harrison screened this debut feature at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, there wasn’t exactly a dearth of tween-twentysomething party films. Go , Doug Liman’s crime comedy rave-set picture released just the year before, and contained hallmarks of late ’90s and early ’00s American party movies: a sunny ska and big beat–peppered soundtrack (hello, Fatboy Slim) and an ensemble of beloved character actors. Timothy Olyphant, Katie Holmes at the peak of Dawson’s Creek fanfare, and James Duval (another Arakiverse dreamboat) appear among a cast of rising stars. But Liman’s feature is far more preoccupied with the shadowy characters and illicit drug syndicates wafting through rave culture. His film is largely indifferent to the luminous dancefloor or spinning DJ decks that fill its frames. Liman leans into the shoot-’em-up.

Modern classics like the House Party trilogy and Can’t Hardly Wait use the house party’ as a backdrop to flirt with their own peripheral teenage woes. In House Party , Kid (Christopher Reid) and his friend Play (Christopher Martin) are grounded, and have parents to thwart in order to make it to their function. Can’t Hardly Wait and even 10 Things I Hate About You use the party as a tool to get a spectrum of pubescent archetypes in the same room. Sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, wasteoids, dickheads. You get it.

Where else will Ethan Embry pester—I mean, profess his love to—bombshell Jennifer Love Hewitt before graduation, if not the quintessential high school party? Where else but Bogey Lowenstien’s (Kyle Cease) kitchenette rager could Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) drunkenly dance to ‘Hypnotize’?

In these pictures, parties and sometimes raves are scaffolding for other ideas. They’re gatherings to sneak off to or crash, the X-spot on a map of youthful willpower and defiance, a carrot of courage for unruly kids keen to escape musky suburban bedrooms. But Greg Harrison doesn’t characterize the warehouse rave as some restricted destination or confectionary backdrop. Raves are the revered centerpiece of his film’s world, the place admittedly older characters seek catharsis and face few limitations. Like electronic-music documentary Modulations before it, Groove possesses an almost archival quality. The film catalogues the importance that its fictionalized dance space carries for participants.

Harrison successfully uses cinema to simulate the embodied experience of being at a party well into the wee hours of the morning. His capacity to transmute the ephemerality of a rave to fixed 35mm film merits entry into the zeitgeist. The only other undeniably simulative party films I have seen are UK rave picture Beats , and of course Steve McQueen’s Small Axe feature Lovers Rock .

Both of these films weave in lingering recurring sequences where the picture absorbs you. Suddenly you’re there, in a sea of precious people. You are a party guest squeezing past grinding lovers on the way to a chaise lounge or a smoker’s balcony. For Harrison, offering realism without hubristically inserting his own biography into a dynamic scene may emerge from his first-hand experience.

From the mid-’90s onward, Harrison frequented underground Bay Area raves thrown by collectives like Cloud Factory and Friends and Family. With his connection to the scene and inclusion of real DJs like Digweed, Polywog and DJ Forest Green, Harrison cinematizes with an authenticity and confidence that might otherwise be diluted by a simplistic fetishism of rave culture. There’s a carefulness to his world-building that feels reminiscent of Party Girl , a film that stretches outside the confines of its rave space, yet still visualizes that space as self-evidently legitimate. Necessary. Worthwhile. Mary (Parker Posey) living to party isn’t merely a wayward lack of focus. Parties are where she sees her friends; they’re what she gets to dress up for.

In Groove , Harrison introduces you to a spectrum of ravers: the aforementioned party organizers, equipment savants, stoners, vinyl-spinning DJs, seasoned partiers, first-timers, body-art enthusiasts. There’s a running gag in the film where Neil (Jeff Witzke) and his boyfriend try to celebrate their one-year anniversary by seeing Digweed spin. Because Guy (Dmitri Ponce) messes up the maps, they never make it to the party. By meeting this array of characters, audiences are given multiple, simultaneous vantage points from which to enter the rave. They are reminded that there is no archetypal party attendee, just people.

Colin (Denny Kirkwood) and Harmony (Mackenzie Firgens), tumultuously coupled ravers, drag Colin’s computer-nerd brother David (Hamish Linklater) to his first rave. In the chill room, David connects with Leyla (Lola Glaudini), a New York transplant and party girl with whom he falls in love during his first ecstasy trip. During my favorite sequence in the film, Leyla, David, Harmony, Colin and Beth enjoy the soft and oblong decor and candy raver sticker collections in the chill room. Incredibly happy and high, David announces his home address to everyone in the room and insists they come over for breakfast the next morning. Then, so earnestly, he says, “Thank you all for being here, really.” In the story’s sunset, rave newbie David ultimately gives collective leader Ernie ‘the nod,’ a coveted gesture of gratitude for taking the risk of planning a renegade at all.

Cliff (Ari Gold), a chemistry TA and the rave’s primary substance provider, vocalizes the film’s harm reductionist perspective. When packaging his ‘goods’ at home, Cliff resists his friend Todd’s (Angelo Spizzirri) characterization of drugs as tools to “fuck [yourself] up.” Cliff insists, “If you’re going to be a successful drug user you’ve gotta be well informed.” Later, Beth supports a teen she used to babysit after an overdose, reminding him not to take drugs on an empty stomach.

By including David's elation, the non-fatal overdose, and Cliff’s street economy, Harrison facilitates a nuanced conversation about an element of party culture that is often stigmatized or glamorized in movies. What works about Groove isn’t merely its affecting portrayal of a seldom depicted world, but Harrison’s commitment to creating a complex ensemble of engaging characters who gather around the maypole that is PLUR (peace, love, unity and respect). With Groove , Harrison isn’t trying to sell you a fantasy about some beat-heavy, utopian underworld. Conflict emerges at the rave. People spar as they tend to do. But through his narrative, it is clear that he firmly understands the transformative power parties can have, how they help people return to themselves, how they make life more liveable.

MJSays concurs: “There ain’t nothing quite like rave culture—and when I say ‘rave culture,’ I don’t mean something like Coachella or Burning Man, where wide-brim hipster hats and Instagram egos take up most of the dancefloor—I’m talking about those now-forgotten underground parties hidden away in industrial warehouses or isolated pine forests, where bottled water was the highest currency, freedom of expression reigned and getting lost in the music was always the sole objective of the night.”

In March, Atlanta’s Audio Video Club asked me to program a film for Cinelogue, their cinema and dialogue series. Surprise, surprise: I chose Groove . The night opened with an interactive exhibit about the film outfitted with printed behind-the-scenes stills, copies of the raver’s manifesto, bubbles, citrus fruit, flowers. After we screened the movie, local DJs spun off vinyl and USB drives for a dancing crowd of attendees. What moved through the space wasn’t just a collection of house heads and giddy, sweaty Southern cinephiles. There was an aftertaste of casual sublimity, the seedlings of Greg Harrison’s cinematic efforts still coming into bloom after a quarter of a century, the succor of experiencing something new in the transcendent presence of strangers.

To my delight, as the subwoofers were loaded up and chairs folded, a few people thanked me for screening the film and attested that they’d tell their friends, roommates, co-workers, and lovers about it too.

On departing they gave me the nod. And I nodded back.

AI + Creativity: Opportunity Or Threat?

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 04:42:36 GMT

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the landscape of creativity, sparking both excitement and fear among the creative community. Agencies now find themselves at a crossroads, where innovative AI-driven tools promise groundbreaking opportunities to enhance productivity, creativity, and audience engagement—but also pose genuine threats to established roles, workflows, and creative cultures.

In his talk for American Marketing Association's AI series, CCO of MOCEAN Greg Harrison shares valuable insights into the practical application of AI, outlining essential strategies to future-proof teams, ensuring agencies remain at the forefront of creativity and innovation in this rapidly evolving era.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• The leading AI tools finding traction in the creative advertising space, with examples of what they can do

• How AI is already transforming creative roles in the agency space

• How agencies can establish creative-friendly AI policies, processes and employee training

• The legal obstacles to wider commercial acceptance of generative AI among entertainment and consumer brand clients

• The 4 key skills essential in the age of AI to keep humans at the center of creativity

Trailer Geeks + Teaser Gods Podcast | Interview With CCO Greg Harrison

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:13:06 GMT

Listen to podcast here

Greg and host Corey Nathan discuss Greg's career arc from independent film to editor to agency leader, custom shoots with FX, Max and PlayStation, and where AI is headed in the creative space. All while enjoying some fine Sazerac cocktails.

01:32 Introducing Greg Harrison: A Creative Force in Entertainment Marketing

02:05 The Art of Crafting the Perfect Drink

03:14 Behind the Scenes: The God of War Campaign

05:57 From Indie Films to Entertainment Marketing: Greg's Journey

07:26 The Craig Murray x Michigan State Connection

18:16 Making It in the Movies: The Journey of an Independent Filmmaker

38:30 Returning to Entertainment Marketing with a Filmmaker's Perspective

43:43 Advice for Aspiring Creatives: Talent, Perseverance, and Luck

52:55 Exploring the Creative Process with Industry Giants

01:01:53 The Impact of AI on Creativity and Industry Evolution

01:22:04 Finding Your Creative Path and Embracing the Mess

UpNext Podcast | Greg Harrison On AI + Creativity

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 17:12:57 GMT

Listen to podcast here

Host Gabriella Mirabelli speaks with Greg Harrison, Chief Creative Officer at MOCEAN, who shares his invaluable insights on the role of AI in the creative industry.

Here's some of what we cover:

• How AI is revolutionizing creative workflows

• The ethical and legal considerations of using AI-generated content

• Practical applications of AI tools for creative tasks

• The future of human-AI collaboration in the creative process

The Future Of AI Regulation In Advertising

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 17:13:21 GMT

Read full article on AdAge

Ad leaders weigh in on the need for setting industry standards for artificial intelligence.

Below is an excerpt of a longer article in AdAge that includes POVs from dozens of leaders from around the ad industry:

As an industry focused on fostering human connections and relating to people on an emotional level, the question of how big of a role AI should play in creative work is an important one.

“I’ve heard many advertising leaders express enthusiasm that AI will help make more effective work, more efficiently,” said Greg Harrison, chief creative officer at Mocean. “But phrases like ‘more effective’ and ‘increased efficiency’ are the words not of creativity, but of commodification.”

Harrison said there’s a danger in creative leaders getting seduced by the false promise that AI can somehow lessen or remove the risk essential to the creative act, and that the best brands and creatives understand that greater value, including more money, is the byproduct of breakthrough creativity.

“At the heart of all great creativity is a person with a vision for something that doesn’t yet exist, who listens to an inner voice, filters it through their personal taste and years of experience, and takes risks in finding unique ways to [express their vision and] move people with their work,” he said.

Edge Of AI Podcast | Amplifying Creativity With AI + Machine Learning

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 01:21:39 GMT

Listen to podcast here

AI isn't just a tool. It's a catalyst for artistic innovation and a bridge to a new era of creativity. In this live episode of the Edge of AI, we go into a conversation about how advanced AI and machine learning helps amplify human creativity.

Joining us are Creative Technologist Tomasz Opasiński, USC Professor Yan Liu, and MOCEAN Chief Creative Officer Greg Harrison. Our illustrious panelists share their thoughts to help unpack the potential of AI to reimagine creativity and how it's shaping content creation today. This conversation will spark your imagination and leave you with a fresh perspective on how generative AI is redefining the creator economy and society as a whole.

Key Takeaways:

• Collaboration between humans and AI will push the boundaries of artistic expression

• Data-driven insights will play a huge role in shaping creative decisions

• There is a massive need for responsible and trustworthy AI practices

• AI tools will provide new opportunities and challenges for creative individuals and teams

• New jobs will emerge and existing roles will transform in response to AI integration

AI Goes To Hollywood: Navigating Emerging Tech In Storytelling

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 17:39:53 GMT

By Dan Patterson
Read article on ZD Net

The use of artificial intelligence by movie and TV studios to generate story ideas and scripts is one reason the Writer's Guild of America went on strike in the spring of 2023. The writers are smart to be concerned, but according to Greg Harrison, chief creative officer at MOCEAN, a creative agency that works with firms like Netflix, Paramount, and Marvel, generative AI technology presents opportunities and challenges for creative professionals.

When AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT emerged, there was a sense of alarm at their promise to generate creative content. But as Harrison and his team explored these and many other AI tools, they concluded that AI is not ready to replace human creativity. It's still a fledgling technology that needs guidance and mentorship, much like a junior creative team member.

"I think that it can be a source of inspiration, it can be a source of investigation," Harrison said. "The ability to summarize material and look for themes is powerful. We found that in playing with it, we can see the beginnings of the potential for it to be a collaborator. A lot of people throw around the term 'copilot,' and I think that feels right. It's got enough knowledge, and under a certain focused inquiry, it can produce inspiration for our creatives."

Harrison envisions AI as a tool, providing a source of inspiration and investigation, particularly when handling large bodies of material and seeking themes. He emphasizes the need to demystify AI and to see it for what it is -- a tool, not an emerging super-intelligent being. This viewpoint aids in managing the fear and concern surrounding AI and its implications for creative jobs.

That said, AI poses concerns, particularly regarding copyright and ethics. Generative AI is trained on large volumes of copyrighted imagery, which could lead to inadvertent infringement issues. Without a clear chain of titles or a clean and ethical training base, using such technology in a professional setting becomes challenging. Solutions like Firefly, Adobe's generative AI tool, are a step in the right direction.

In the near future, AI will be a collaborator, a source of inspiration under the direction of a creative director. The technology's potential as a tool for visual brainstorming, exploration, and possibly even creating final outputs is promising as long as it remains under human control. This could also lower the cost of complex visual effects or high-end 3D designs, opening new doors for creative ambitions.

However, AI's role in the creative industry isn't solely in generating content. It could also contribute by automating non-creative tasks, liberating time for creatives to focus on their craft.

If integrating AI into a creative workflow, Harrison advises a cautious approach. He emphasizes the importance of valuing human creativity and culture and letting that guide one's engagement with AI. In the short term, AI tools are best used for exploration, inspiration, and visual reference. It is crucial to experiment with them and understand their current limitations while examining their future potential.

"When used correctly, it can free creatives to focus time and energy on creative tasks, which has value," Harrison said.

The convergence of AI and creativity presents an intriguing landscape for creative industries. Whether viewed as a tool, threat, or collaborator, the future of AI in these industries is ripe with possibilities. As we navigate this landscape, the focus should remain on preserving human creativity and culture, fostering collaboration, and maximizing the opportunities AI offers.

Launching A Car With Disney Magic: Making The Chevy Bolt Campaign

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 05:10:54 GMT

The following are interview excerpts with CCO & Director Greg Harrison.

In this campaign, you bridge the worlds of entertainment & traditional brand advertising. How did that challenge you to think differently about your approach?

We see brand partnerships like mash-ups, and have done a number in the entertainment space. Whether it’s John Oliver showing up in Game Of Thrones for an HBO brand spot or merging the comic sensibilities of The Simpsons and FXX for the show’s launch on the network, we’ve had a lot of experience merging two brand voices into a single creative expression.

The Disney+Chevy Bolt EUV campaign was definitely one of the largest brand partnerships we’ve done, and our first automotive campaign. So while both Disney and Chevy agreed to a brand anthem approach with less focus on retail messaging, we still had to consider how to launch a new electric car to Chevy’s customers.

That meant everything from us poring over Chevy’s brand book, researching the car’s technology, and discussing marketing priorities with Disney and Chevy, to understanding how our creative execution could tell a cinematic and emotional story while seamlessly integrating the car’s new features and Chevy’s preferred angles of the car’s refreshed design.

How does your experience in entertainment marketing give a unique perspective when approaching brand advertising campaigns?

I think we have a unique perspective on both the creative and production process. Creatively, our teams are highly skilled in the visual and emotional impact of cinematic storytelling – thinking in pictures, sound design and music. Pairing that approach with our passion and knowledge of pop culture makes for a potent combination when creating partnership ideas for brands.

As an integrated agency, we like to say we can think strategically and execute at the speed of entertainment, and this campaign really put that to the test. We went from initial brief and campaign concepting, to scripting, production, editing and finishing in two months, all in-house and all while navigating dozens of layers of approvals across Disney and Chevy.

We relied on the skills we’ve developed in entertainment to be highly collaborative and transparent both internally and with clients, with direct connections between our makers and their stakeholders. I’m not sure there are many traditional brand agencies that could work at the scale, speed, and quality we did.

How did you use brand storytelling to highlight the "magic" of these two brands?

The exciting news was there was a lot of buy-in across the Disney portfolio to be part of the campaign, so we had access to some of the most magical and iconic properties in pop culture. Our work was focused on organically connecting those properties to the features and functions of the Bolt EUV.

The first moment that clicked was connecting Tinkerbell’s pixie dust to the magic of electric car tech, leading us to create a young Tinkerbell fan as the source of that pixie dust. In our creative meetings, we reminisced about the excitement of vacation road trips as kids, waking up before the sun. The darkness of pre-dawn gave us a perfect environment to link our girl’s pixie dust with the power of the Bolt EUV, lighting street lamps on Main Street as she and her family left town.

We then brainstormed dozens of tie-in moments between car features and Disney characters. Then, through a process of Disney prioritizing IP from Disney World rides, Chevy settling on the key features for the car, and our team vetting the most visually impactful combinations, we landed on the final spot.

The Bolt EUV’s rear camera mirror was a perfect connection to the ghosts’ mirror reflections in the Haunted Mansion ride; the car’s new, larger sunroof a perfect portal to discover a squadron of Dumbos; and racing an X-Wing across farmland a perfect cinematic expression of the car’s punch in Sport Mode.

Also, one of our concepts that ultimately didn’t make the main spot – connecting Groot’s protective orbs from Guardians Of The Galaxy to the safety of the Bolt EUV’s auto-drive feature – led to us creating an additional standalone spot.

You've worked with Disney properties in the past. How was this campaign similar and different from your previous experience?

We’ve had a 30+ year relationship with Disney, launching many of the classic and modern animation films for Disney and Pixar, as well as dozens of Marvel’s tentpole films and series in the last decade. So we had an incredible depth of knowledge of the Disney brand and stories from which to draw when bringing this campaign to life.

Our job was really to express what the two brands shared in values and audience. As we developed ideas with our clients in the Disney Corporate Alliances group, it really came down to the optimism, fun and innovation that both brands share.

Working at this brand level and then taking that work into an original two-plus minute brand film was a unique challenge, very different from creating a trailer and TV campaign for a single film or show. But it allowed us to flex all the other capabilities we’ve developed at our agency over the last 5 years.

To learn more, watch the Advertising Week panel below with MOCEAN's CCO Greg Harrison & COO Erica Coates, Walt Disney Company's VP Global Partnerships Chris Lisciandro & SVP Global Partnerships Mindy Hamilton, moderated by CEO Creativ Strategies Wes Morton.

ADVERTISING WEEK PANEL

Brand Storytelling | Turning Customers Into Super-Fans

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 19:23:48 GMT

Read on Brand Storytelling website

Turning customers into super fans is no small feat. Tapping into the key tenets of what boosts brand affinity for the casual consumer calls for the delicate integration of data into creative that then moves, educates, and/or inspires. Doing so demands know-how on both sides of the brain, and, most importantly, the ability for the two to work together. Of course this applies to the generation of branded content and entertainment itself, but before one can even get that far, the same powerful combo of information and artistry needs to be deployed from the earliest moments of connecting with and launching a project with a brand.

MOCEAN, the west-coast integrated entertainment and brand agency, is using both sides of the brain to create brand lift for brands in fashion, film, and more. Brand Storytelling caught up with Greg Harrison, Chief Creative Officer at MOCEAN, to learn more about how the full service agency creates fans and builds community by boosting brand affinity.

What is the great benefit of brands who are open to making brand films?

It’s creating brand love by genuinely entertaining or educating your audience with content that’s meaningful to them, such that they seek it out and want to share it with others.

While there’s ample evidence audiences can be allergic to overt marketing and advertising tactics, those same audiences welcome branded content if it’s authentic, entertaining, and most importantly, relevant to their world.

What are some of the pitfalls that plague brands looking to make really good branded content?

Creating good branded content is different from creating good advertising or marketing, and the pitfalls are often rooted in trying to apply the tenets of the latter to the former.

Effective branded content’s impact is measured in conversation, shares, and sentiment, not in typical ad KPI’s and quarterly sales results. It’s important for brands to be realistic about how branded content is a longer-term play to build a meaningful relationship with your audiences and fans.

Patience and perseverance is key – focus on what your brand has to say and then say it consistently and honestly over time.

Do you typically bring brands story ideas, or do brands bring the ideas to you?

For us it’s worked both ways, but it’s best when it’s a 2-way conversation, discussing both the brand’s mission and voice as well as specific ideas and concepts.

Often, we’ll receive a log line or a content category a brand is interested in exploring and we’ll engage our strategy and creative teams to expand these into creative platforms, then treatments, scripts, digital series bibles and ultimately production plans. For clients we have a history with, knowing their audience, voice and mission often leads to ideas we pitch back to them for new content.

A good example of this back-and-forth is the branded content we’ve created for our long-time client Focus Features. They came to us wanting to rethink the typical interview-based content they were producing for their digital channels. We knew their audiences were cinefiles that love the art and craft of film. They liked the idea of doing something with the locations of their films, which led us to pitching the digital series Reel Destinations, a hosted, film-focused travelog series, which is now on its 14th episode and has spawned two other spinoff series.

How do you get the brands themselves to think differently about their approach to content?

MOCEAN’s unique approach to content stems from our long history working in the entertainment space with major studios and streaming brands. In entertainment, we speak to fandoms via cinematic storytelling and production values, with a focus on characters and emotion. We’ve found this is an effective way to communicate with audiences of brands outside of entertainment as well.

Seeing customers as fans and your brand or product as an entertainment experience can be a great way to start thinking differently about how to communicate, especially for entertainment-adjacent brands in music, gaming, fashion and lifestyle. We’ve even applied this thinking to one of our restaurant brand AORs to great effect.

What can one do to get more rigorous or thoughtful briefs from brands? How do you impact the creative desires of brands on your end?

While we can apply our art and craft of entertainment storytelling to a brand’s mission, it’s only successful if what it’s trying to communicate is clear and resonant; Getting to know the values and core story of the brand is key.

Brands can’t afford to be agnostic in the culture anymore. Why is the brand doing what they’re doing for their audience or customers? What do they stand for, what messages in the culture do they stand by, and what’s their point of view in the world at large? Answering these questions are the cornerstone to more thoughtful briefs and creative in the branded content space.

For our part, MOCEAN combines our deep-dive into a brand’s story with our own research around their audiences to generate a clear strategy of what to say, how to say it, and where to say it to have the most impact. Our goal is to reflect back our insights about our client’s brand and audiences to inspire them to see what kind of creative is possible.

This strategy becomes the fuel for our creative teams, who have a long history of transforming a brand’s mission, values and voice into compelling stories, emotions and visuals, bringing to bear our decades of expertise in entertainment storytelling.

At its best, what do you think branded content can achieve?

Great branded content amplifies the brand’s position in culture with an authentic voice that is legitimately part of the conversation. This creates a connection and loyalty among audiences that’s the basis of long-term stability and growth for the brand.

Rising Tides: How MOCEAN Cultivates Creative Talent

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:23:48 GMT

By Greg Harrison

For a creative agency like MOCEAN, nothing is more fundamental to our success than how we hire and retain talent. Based on our CEO Craig Murray’s initial vision, we’ve had a 30-year legacy of discovering, mentoring, and promoting talent across the company. In fact, I benefited from this culture myself: after becoming the company’s first intern in the early 90’s, I returned ten years ago, first as an editor, then creative director, ECD, and now Chief Creative Officer. I’m now part of a leadership team dedicated to growing MOCEAN as an agency unique among our competitors that great creatives love to call home.

Below I share some of what we’ve learned, in hopes we continue to inspire generations of artists who become leaders, at our own company and industry-wide.

Minding The Gap

There’s a talk from Ira Glass where he mentions “the gap”: The space between what a young person starting out knows is great work and what they’re currently able to achieve. Some creative leaders may see that gap as a candidate's limit and look elsewhere, but at MOCEAN we’re curious about it.

Instead of evaluating a candidate’s reel or book solely at face value, we like to ask what they think of it. If a candidate is self-aware enough to articulate what they were aiming for even if they didn’t quite achieve it – and driven enough to not give up – we know they’re committed to doing the work that will close that gap. In short: vision, passion, and determination outweigh the exact state of their portfolio.

Growing Great Ideas

We aim to hire entry-level candidates when they’re passionate about something. Sure, they need to be good at whatever the initial position requires, but we’re also thinking about how this person will be part of our future growth.

We’ve found it’s critical to know the passions of our new hires and put them into the meetings and opportunities that connect with those passions as soon as possible. For instance, a newly-hired coordinator had interests in photography, filmmaking, and writing, but had just graduated with only student and personal work in her portfolio. Even as a coordinator, we made sure she was in every client meeting with access to every brief. We encouraged her to submit concepts, including for a long-time client’s big custom launch teaser.

With mentorship from the creative leads, two ideas made the final deck and one was selected to be shot, with an A-list star performing the dialogue she wrote. The teaser went on to win multiple awards, proving good ideas aren’t always tied to experience, as long as you create a collaborative, supportive space for people to bring their voice.

Building Decades Of Teams

Our industry is crazy demanding, with long hours, a deluge of projects, and compressed budgets. In this climate, some businesses drive a roster of younger, lower-cost talent to burnout, with high turnover rates as part of the business model.

Conversely, we’ve found our longevity as a company comes from decades of following Craig and our President Michael McIntyre’s founding ethos: focus on the wellness of our people. We’re proud to say MOCEAN maintains nearly twice the industry average employee retention rate, including dozens of employees with us 10-15 years. We attribute our record retention to a focus on work/life balance, the needs of parents and families, social events, encouraging time off, work-from-home flexibility, celebrating team wins, and most importantly, ensuring an employee’s hard work leads to their growth.

There’s a Catch-22 when starting out: the better you are at something, the harder it is to move up, as business demands make it difficult to disrupt a well-running team. But we’ve made it our goal to do the opposite, by encouraging people to stretch beyond their current job title, prioritizing new opportunities for young talent, and celebrating milestones across the company when people move up.

Creatives Leading Creatives

While it’s critical to our success to have good leadership, promoting people from makers to a manager of makers can be challenging: putting down their instrument and picking up the conductor’s baton initially feels like they’re leaving their creative life behind.

But I live by the belief that to be a good manager of creatives you must keep growing as a creative yourself. We encourage our leaders to stay close to the work they love and keep pushing themselves creatively, while supporting their growth as leaders with management training sessions and one-on-one coaching. This engenders trust among teams who see their leaders not just as managers, but also as fellow makers.

We hope each person’s dedication to their art & craft is an inspiration to the person next to them, pushing us all to do our best work. Given the ever-increasing demands of our industry, it’s in all of our best interests to do right by our people, to make it our priority to find them, grow them, and teach them to do the same for others.

Brands: Steal These 5 Lessons From Entertainment Marketing Campaigns

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 05:10:52 GMT

By Greg Harrison
Read on MediaPost website

For anyone in advertising, fan obsession is the holy grail — when audiences not only seek out your work, but proudly share it as part of the pop-culture conversation.

Perhaps more than any other industry, entertainment campaigns achieve this level of brand love, with fans regularly tracking the release of advertising, passionately posting about, sharing, and deconstructing it online.

While it doesn’t hurt to have a great movie or TV show to promote, here are five key principles from entertainment marketing that can help elicit this seemingly elusive response for any brand.

1. Make entertainment, not advertising

The best film and TV ads focus on emotion over information, because audiences don’t just want to know something, they want to feel something. FX makes campaigns on this emotional level, aiming for conversation and shareability over narrative clarity, like this teaser for Atlanta season 2 .

2. Tease, don’t tell

Great entertainment campaigns practice the art of the tease, withholding information to cause the right amount of curiosity. Tease a key element of the story to its climactic revealand audiences will scour the internet for more. Netflix’s teaser for "13 Reasons Why” season 2 shows how saying as little as possible can create big buzz, with over 14 million views across social channels.

3. Embrace cinema

In the age of mobile phones, “cinema” doesn’t just mean “big screen.” It’s telling stories through imagery, sound, music, and the artful juxtaposition of all three. Cinematic stories are the most powerful, as they aren’t told in words, but created in the viewer’s mind. As Alfred Hitchcock said, “I make movies where they don't have to read the subtitles in Japan.” So should you. HBO’s final Game Of Thrones teaser is a prime example.

4. Find strategy in the creative

Strategy is key to reaching the right people, but spending months on it before making anything keeps you from being nimble in today’s lightning-fast media landscape.

Entertainment marketers create relevant work fast without traditional strategists by building creative teams of bingers, gamers, audiophiles, comic-book collectors, sports fans and film nerds.

When a team like this asks “What do I love about this?” instead of “What’s the positioning?,” the strategy naturally emerges. What better way to position a new take on Spider-Man than with creatives that grew up on comic books and have the action figures in their edit bays?

5. Think like a fan

To reach today’s media-savvy consumers, you have to listen. That means learning what they like and speaking to them authentically. In essence, brands need to become fans themselves.

For example, Netflix’s social campaigns feel created by a fellow fanatic, sharing the same enthusiasm for its shows as its audience and engaging in conversations via entertaining, UGC-style posts on its Instagram feed that respond to what its community cares about.

These principles of entertainment marketing are also a roadmap for non-entertainment marketers looking to navigate changes in the way consumers interact with their brands. If you aspire to build brand love and cultural relevance, thinking of your consumers as fans is a great way to start.

Muse By Clios | Inside MOCEAN's Classic Set-Crashing Promo for HBO's Last Week Tonight

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 06:51:47 GMT

By Greg Harrison
Read on Muse By Clios website

We’ve had a longstanding and collaborative relationship with the HBO marketing team, but our 2017 promo for John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight stands out as one of the most memorable. Here’s how a show launch evolved into a viral HBO brand campaign.

The Idea

In 2016, HBO marketing shared a simple promo premise they discussed with Oliver and his executive producers: What if John shows up on the wrong HBO show sets?

We immediately recognized the comedic potential and brainstormed with HBO various scenarios to bring it to life. We explored the list of their returning hit shows for inspiration and cameo ideas, sharing example scripts and boards, helping the marketing team engage the larger HBO team to explore approvals from other showrunners and availability of talent.

Luckily, Last Week Tonight was a much-beloved show among fellow HBO celebrities. In the end, the stars aligned—figuratively and literally—resulting in three of HBO’s biggest shows signing on: Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Crashing the Sets

With the show list set, we got to work on creative development, a director’s treatment, and most importantly, production logistics. We knew our Game of Thrones intro wouldn’t work unless we matched the show’s massive production value, so our production designer recreated the iconic Throne Room from the show’s original set schematics. Built in three days over Thanksgiving in L.A., we replicated the exact architecture, stone textures and even the lighting plan. Ironically, it took longer to build than to use, with our crew dismantling this majestic set the day after shooting.

For Silicon Valley, we placed John in the Pied Piper house with Dinesh, played by Kumail Nanjiani. Kumail was a huge fan of the show, so it took some encouragement for him to fully embrace the premise: to mercilessly insult John. This unlocked a hilarious flow of on-set improv, with the remaining challenge being to stifle our laughter and not ruin takes. Much of what’s in the edit is from that improv.

For the final Curb Your Enthusiasm segment, we shot John’s walk-and-talk with Larry David on the Sony backlot. To enhance Larry’s informal, no-nonsense presence, we gave him a blue popsicle to eat while one-upping Oliver. What we didn’t anticipate was that running dozens of takes for improv, combined with the Los Angeles heat, meant Larry ate two entire boxes of blue popsicles, with the hair and makeup team having to stop periodically to address his blue lips.

Going Viral

The Last Week Tonight promo was released in early January 2017. With the show’s popularity (and Emmy wins) rising, combined with iconic HBO sets and hilarious celebrity cameos, the spot had all the elements to grab the attention of fans. And by leveraging the social channels of the shows and talent across all four titles, HBO turned it into a de facto brand marketing asset.

The promo quickly went viral, racking up over 25 million views across social media, with over 5 million views on YouTube alone. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with the top YouTube comment declaring it “one of the best promos for a TV show I’ve ever seen.” The spot also went on to win a litany of awards, including Clio Gold for Entertainment and TV/Streaming Comedy; Promax Gold for Funniest Promo, Comedy Campaign, News Program Campaign, and Set Design; and a Golden Trailer Award for Best Comedy in TV/Streaming.

For MOCEAN, it was one of the most creatively satisfying client collaborations we’ve ever had and helped us become a go-to agency for custom content involving our clients’ A-list stars and showrunners.

Dispatch From Sundance Institute's Middle East Screenwriters Lab

greg@gregharrisonfilm.com (Greg Harrison) — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 05:10:49 GMT

By Greg Harrison

Sundance Institute creative advisor Greg Harrison attended the Middle East Screenwriters Lab in search of “another round of magic.” In the wake of the 10-day desert retreat, he shared his newfound insight on the screenwriting process and the curious absence of writing at the lab.

In the dead of night, the in-flight Mecca compass rotated left as the plane banked south somewhere over the Netherlands. Surrounding me, silhouetted by reading lights, a handful of Middle Eastern passengers quietly prayed as a movie flickered on screens above us: An Arab action-comedy satirizing James Bond in the style of The Three Stooges.

To say that my first ever trip to the Middle East felt surreal is an understatement. Only a week ago I was staring at my laptop in a Silverlake coffeehouse, struggling with the outline for a new script I’m writing, trying to remember exactly why I was born.

Luckily, an email from Sundance Institute’s Alesia Weston offered me an opportunity to trade my existential desert for a real one: “I wanted to reach out with a really random invitation in case you were free or interested…” she began, asking if I would be available as an Advisor for the 10-day Middle East Screenwriters Lab held at a world-renowned eco-resort in the middle of the Jordanian desert. The short answer—after my wife agreed to 10 days of solo parenting in exchange for untold spa weekends—was, “Sign me up!”

I wasn’t exactly new to the allure of the Sundance Institute Labs. I’d been a fellow at the Utah labs in 2006, and consider that experience a crucial leap forward for me as a writer. So naturally I was excited to have another round of the magic, especially as an advisor. The idea of jumping into a new culture with filmmakers from all over the world sounded exactly like what I needed. Or was at least the most inventive form of procrastination I had yet conceived.

With an 18-hour flight, a 10-hour time difference, and massive sleep deprivation, my memory of arriving in Amman is a fragmented blur: Gaba, our preeminent local guide from the Royal Film Commission, who greeted us with his beatific smile; the hundreds of Arabic campaign posters in downtown Amman (a big parliamentary election was only weeks away); Roman ruins interspersed amid mosques; the cacophony of Arab prayer calls mixed with street vendors hawking everything from produce to freshly pirated DVDs (yes, all our movies were for sale).

It took a few days to acclimate to the time change and for the rest of the Fellows and Advisors to arrive, but then we were off in a tour bus headed for the desert. The route took us along the Dead Sea, stopping at a Bedouin town to transfer to pickup trucks for the 40-minute ride on unpaved roads to the Dana Biosphere Reserve. Finally, the Feynan resort appeared like an oasis and the staff greeted us with homemade tea, cool towels, and the local camel, Two Reds. It felt like the most exotic vacation I could imagine.

But of course, we were really in the desert to work. The daily rhythm of the week went like this: Breakfast. Group Advisor meeting for us to discuss the status of the scripts. Three-hour one-on-one meetings with the Fellows. Lunch. More one-on-ones. Dinner. Screening. Hanging out on the roof watching shooting stars. Sleep. Get up and do it again. Okay, maybe “work” is too strong a word.

One of the aspects of the Lab that often surprises Fellows is that there’s no writing. I remember going to Utah as a Fellow and thinking I’d have a new draft by the end of the week. But what I discovered then, and now as an Advisor feel is the genius of the Lab, is that the focus is on a higher level of script discussion, namely: “What is it about?” Sure, we also talk about writing dialogue, editing scenes, thinking visually, but these are just aspects of the craft. The more I write, the more I see how the actual writing of the script is only a step in a process that calls you to continually ask questions about how you see the world and what truths about the human experience you are trying to express.

These kinds of discussions were the most satisfying moments in the Lab for me. Over the course of days, I saw Fellows discovering and at times eloquently articulating what was really driving them to write their stories, regardless how far along their actual screenplays were. Uncovering these sometimes hidden answers is like discovering an organizing force—a magnet—that you can drop into the middle of the draft and then watch as the pieces align and shift and are even repelled by its presence. It can allow the writer to dive back into the ground level of the rewrite with more clarity about what should stay and what should go. Not that that clarity comes immediately or easily. It can be a harrowing time for the fellows to be asked to confront the deeper questions of their work, and to face the gap between what they intended to say and what they’ve been able to express on the page thus far.

Luckily, there was a community of writers and mentors to support them throughout the process, and I can attest to the camaraderie and sheer buzz that developed among us over the week: Suha’s and Basil’s contagious laughter while telling each other inside jokes in Arabic; an inspiring screening of Motorcycle Diaries on the roof beneath the haze of the Milky Way; Wash and Bill bringing the rock with acoustic covers of the Beatles, with Mohammed backing them up on Arabic drum; and our intrepid artistic director Ziad, whose passion when discussing just about anything was utterly infectious.

But perhaps the deepest bond formed on our final night when Mohannad and Reem from The Royal Film Commission unveiled…International Video Karaoke, complete with hundreds of Western and Arabic songs. And so, in the haze of shisha smoke (apple-flavored tobacco, people!) and red wine, we bid goodbye to the desert with half-remembered 80s pop songs (yours truly belting out Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer”) and what was giddily described to me by Karim, one of our Fellows, as “the cheapest, lowest class Egyptian pop music available in the world.” If this was not the zenith of cultural exchange, then I do not know what is.

I’ve often described the labs to friends as summer camp for film, with a similar sense of intensity, bonding, and finally melancholy as it winds to a close. As any Advisor or Fellow will tell you, it’s difficult to say goodbye to such an immersive experience. And yet I was happy to emerge from the Lab creatively refreshed, inspired not only by the other advisors whose work I’ve admired, but also by the energy and drive of the Fellows embarking on their first feature.

Staying in touch with that excitement, idealism—and yes, even a kind of naïveté—is critical to willing a project to life, regardless how long you’ve been making films. And I for one feel grateful to have had the opportunity to dip into that well one more time.

Shukran, Sundance!