Impulse Super Deform is an advertisement for the Kodak Student Commercial Awards, held every year in the UK. Sponsored by Kodak, Arriflex, and CFS - film students are supplied with a choice of briefs for actual products from advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather. Then they're given 400 ft. (roughly 11 minutes) of 16 mm film stock to realize a commercial. It is the largest and most prestigious film school competition in the UK and Ireland.

I started out with some hard limits on budget and practicality. I wanted to make something for as little money as possible - the stock and the processing were free. I also wanted to make something very dynamic and kinetic, using the camera to instill a sense of urgency and putting your eye to express the characters' relation to each other in any given moment. Something tongue in cheek, fun, derivative, and maybe even slightly subversive.  

I chose the brief for Elida Faberge's Impulse Body Spray. The brief specified that I'd have to connect the product to a clean, white light; and to appeal to women between 13-24. Over the years Impulse campaigns feature a girl spraying the stuff all over her body, which in turn causes an extreme reaction in a man. Hiliarty often ensues. There have been some genuinely cute and clever ads with this concept. I wanted to take that but use it in a new environment and setting for this product. The title refers to a particular sub genre of japanese animation: Super Deform is when you take an established character, even one aimed at adults, and make a cute, squishy version of it.

I proceeded to do my thang and rough out some sketches, a process I always go through as directing nears. I'll start with sketches of the characters, trying to get an impression or feeling about how they'll look, then proceed to draw rough storyboards and then will just give up as I remind myself why I didn't pursue that career in comic books. But for this I did something for the first time as I became frustrated with the slothlike pace of my drawing - I proceeded to do a fully 3D animatic. Mostly for fear of the stock limit. At any time if the crew were in doubt about a shot I could run this for them, and give a sense of the finished product in preproduction. There would hopefully be no doubt about what I wanted to achieve; at least that line of communication would be open perfectly, without debate. I guess I was hoping I could avoid entropy's mighty viselike grip until actual shooting. The animatic succeeded, however, and kept the shoot extremely organized and we were able to do an enormous amount of setups in two short days.

It also helped convince people what we were working on. Sally Inman at Arriflex, especially, helped by providing a terrific camera package for the piece. As I was also the camera operator, I can't say enough how much support she lent to the piece.

M&P modeling agency were kind enough to give me one of their represented models, the wonderful Olivia Rochelle, for free. Despite having never done any work in front of a motion picture camera before, she was terrific. She could repeat the same phsyical action or slight gesture repeatedly without getting bored or annoyed, and would nail it every time. My buddy Carl, who I enjoy tormenting, stepped in to play the tormented android man.

In the end, the only thing I ended up really paying for were the lights, transport, insurance, and food (and the most important lesson I learned - never ever skimp on food. Nothing makes your crew work harder or better than the promise of food. Warm food is especially powerful, and warms up morale as well. I kid you not). Everything else was donated or reduced to next to nothing.

Emm Gryner was kind enough to trust me, and take time from a tour (she's crazy) and compose music for the piece, which to me saved the shorter cut. It tied together the frenetic visuals, and reinforced my original idea. 

Jose Garrido, the editor, did everything imaginable to the footage to get the cut down to 30 seconds. I won't even tell you some of the techniques we used that are in the final piece, because they're embarassing (I remember at one desperate low point suggesting removing one frame from each shot - and I promise you I would never do that - but man, we were tired). Jose did an amazing job, however, and I learned a lot from his work.

Now I have a chance, online, to show the one minute cut, which I feel communicates the original idea in the script more clearly. As for the award, it truly belongs to a large list of people - this cost me next to nothing and it was because of help from professionals who gave this little poseur of an ad the professional sheen it might have. Since they didn't let me give a speech on the night...

So thank you to Sally Inman at Arriflex, Jose Garrido, Alex Kinsman, Moritz Winkler, Asim Ullah, Olivia, Carl, Paula, Pan Su, Neill Gorton, Alan Rogers, Foxtrot Productions, Barnaby at AFM, Abby at Framestore, Rob Garvie and Tony Kent at Panavision, Cedric Behrel for laughing, Kirsty at M&P, Flo Austin, and most of all Carl Ng, Mary, and Duncan.

Aaron Stewart

Alex Kinsman