Belefant reduces staff by 40%.

April 8, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Citing the ‘recession that won’t go away’, Belefant, a commercial production company based in Portland, Oregon, announced today that it is reducing staff by 40%.

“It’s not as drastic as it sounds,” explains Brian Belefant, trying to put a positive spin on the announcement. “People aren’t getting let go and nobody’s salary is being reduced.” The reduction is in the hours people will put in. Effective immediately, all staff are being required to take two days off a week.

“At times like these it’s easy to forget why we do what we do,” explains Belefant. “We’re craftsmen. We live to create. Getting caught up in where the next job is coming from or how we’re going to make payroll doesn’t make us better at what we do. It makes us worse.” Because of that, all staff members will immediately be required to use two of every five days creating something.

“I don’t care what you make, just as long as you make something.” As for himself, Belefant intends to focus on several projects. “I haven’t been as dedicated to my writing and photography as I’d like,” says Belefant, who writes several blogs, including The 60 Second Director, which provides quick lessons in directing for up-and-coming directors. He’s also a celebrated fine art photographer, known for shooting through liquids relevant to the subject being photographed.

Belefant explains that the company is particularly well-positioned to survive a protracted slump. “We learned a lot from the last recession. Our move to Portland from LA two and a half years ago drastically reduced our overhead.”

The reductions will not immediately affect Belefant’s offices in the historic Ford Building, where huge picture windows flood the spacious offices with north light. Nor will the company’s fleet of vehicles be reduced. As a matter of fact, the 15-year-old Trek bicycle that Belefant uses for daily commuting is likely to have its front suspension replaced.

“At a time when agencies are shuttering all around, no matter how hard we work we can’t conjure commercials to direct,” muses Belefant. “What we can do is hone our talents. When work comes in, we’ll be in a much better position to do it.”

For more information, please telephone Brian Belefant at (503) 715 2852 or send an email to brian@belefant.com. Don’t bother calling Tuesday or Thursday.


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You can singlehandedly help end the recession.

On commercial shoots there's a lot of down time. And during that down time, people swap stories.

One story I heard was about a spot that, I think, was shot for Special K. It involved a woman getting out of bed on her wedding day. According to the story, the spot only ran four times because somebody called Kellogs to complain that it looked to them as if the woman had been sleeping with a dog between her legs.

I don’t know if the story is true, but it’s consistent with a lot of stories I’ve heard over the years. Clients that will pull spots because of one or two complaints.

Granted, as a copywriter I worked at agencies that often took pride is pushing the lines of taste and decency, but now that I direct I still hear them. And now, the stories are a little less apocryphal. Because I hear them from clients themselves.

Let’s assume the story about the Special K spot is true. What happened?

Kellogs clearly had a marketing plan, and that plan involved a certain amount of advertising effort against Special K. If they pulled the spot, what did they do about the media they’d bought? And more important, what did Special K’s brand manager do to continue on the track toward increasing the brand’s market share?

Resurrecting an old commercial wasn’t an option. After all, the agency had convinced the client that the old commercial needed to be replaced.

And not advertising wasn’t an option, either. Departments get budgets that need to be spent. If a brand doesn’t advertise this year, its budget is likely to be cut next year.

I don’t need to know what happened to know what happened. After a lot of discussion, the agency either re-shot the commercial or produced a brand new one.

A new director was hired, the team flew to L.A., and everybody—and I mean everybody from the bell hops at the Four Seasons to the bartenders at the Viper Room made money.

So I had this idea.

Our economy is in the dumps. And you and I are in a position to help fix it. What I want you to do is watch t.v. When you see commercial you don’t like, complain. Call, write a letter, whatever. Just think of something totally inane about the spot that offends you (and it’s got to be something more than, “I did a spot with exactly the same concept for Hertz in 1988.”)

You’ll be getting bad advertising off the air and giving the agency another shot at doing something really great. And you’ll be providing jobs and stimulating the economy.

In fact, I don’t mind if you complain about something I’ve shot. Sure, I’m proud of it. And I realize I’d never be hired to shoot the commercial that was created to replace it. But I’m thinking big picture here. I’m willing to sacrifice my work for the good of the nation.

Besides, maybe I’ll get to bid on the new spot for Special K.

YouTube, The Great Satan

If you’ve been following me for the past month, you know that I finally finished ‘Burning Passion’--my brutally cynical dark comedy about a guy who ejaculates fire.

I’ve done film festivals, and frankly after playing in more than 50 of them I got tired of showing my work to other people there to show their work to me. Not that they didn’t have good work. Some of them had extraordinary work. But it was at best a mutual admiration society and at worst a mutual bitch session.

So I decided to take an alternate route. I set a date (Valentine’s Day), on which I planned to release the film to the world. For free.

As part of the plan, I put a trailer for the film up on YouTube. And thanks partly to a clever selection of tags and the early and enthusiastic support of a lot of film bloggers, the trailer racked up more than 17,000 hits in two weeks. Not amazing by YouTube standards, but incredibly respectable.

And then YouTube took the trailer down. I got a notice that I had violated Community Guidelines.

The guidelines, in a nutshell, are

No pornography or sexually explicit content
No bad stuff like animal abuse
No graphic or gratuitous violence
No gross-out stuff
No copyright infringement
No hate speech
No predatory behavior
And no misleading tags, titles, or thumbnails.

I’m a firm believer that things are usually named for exactly what they’re not, so the fact that YouTube calls these rules Community Guidelines is a pretty clear indication that there is no community there. In fact, most of the thousands of people who rated the trailer gave it four or five stars, so I think it’s fair to argue that the trailer actually appealed to the community’s shared values.

Whatever.

The part that irks me is that there’s no mechanism to question the decision. Sure, YouTube might argue that a film about a guy who ejaculates fire might somehow violate numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, but can you say the same thing about the trailer for the film?

Then again, the film is extremely well produced. As is the trailer. I shot everything on 35mm film and even spent a ton of money to hire the same guy to do the voice over for the trailer who does all the Hollywood trailers. So maybe they’re concerned that I violated someone’s copyright by putting it up.

They didn’t ask, and if they had I would have showed them all my cancelled checks, licensing agreements, and copyright certificates.

More likely, someone flagged it.

Flagging is a way the “community” can police YouTube for content they think is inappropriate. In order to educate viewers about how to flag videos, YouTube has created, of course, a video. A video which, among other things, uses a voice over to tell you it’s not okay to post a video showing something shocking while showing images of a man reinserting his intestines into his abdomen.

Call me vengeful, but I think that kind of imagery should not be allowed.

So join me, won’t you, in flagging YouTube’s video. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA22WSVlCZ4&eurl=http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines. Sure, you won’t accomplish anything, other than tripping some algorithm that identifies you as a troublemaker in the YouTube database. But if enough people get tagged as troublemakers, eventually YouTube will have to concede that we are, fundamentally, its community.

Portland is no LA (How Refreshing)

Since I started working, I’ve moved from one city to another nine times –– mostly from New York to LA or back again. This last move, to Portland, was the first time I didn’t pack up a truck to further my career.

Actually, I was afraid that it would be the opposite. I was convinced that my career would suffer, but I was willing to sacrifice the quality and scope of my work in order to raise my kids someplace where day care centers don’t have valet parking.

Then I directed my first job in Portland.

Okay, I’m not really surprised to find decent actors, producers, and crews in Portland. I’d shot in places as off-the-Hollywood-radar as Moncton, Tampa, and Detroit and the people I worked with in all those places were pretty good. But the ones in Portland? Wow.

So far I’ve shot three jobs here and every one of them has been an absolute pleasure. But it was the two jobs I did back-to-back a couple of months ago—one in New York and the other in LA –– that sealed the deal.

I asked the people at Portland’s @Large Films to produce the New York job. And yes, I was a little nervous. But they pulled it off spectacularly, coming in under budget while making me, the ad agency, and the client extremely happy. Just after that, I got a job in California which I asked an LA company I had once been affiliated with to produce.

It was a spectacular disaster.

What I realized is that sure, the very best people end up in New York and LA, but so do the very worst.

And when the really good people get fed up with the nastiness, a lot of them –– us, really –– decide to move to places like Portland. Places where you don’t have to pad your budget with cash to pay off the gardeners with leaf blowers who appear like wildflowers after a spring rain when a camera truck pulls up. Places where people don’t lean on their horns as they pass a shoot because they’re offended at having to slow down on the way to their own set.

But that’s only part of it. A small part. A lot of the people on my jobs here had never worked in New York or LA. So it’s not like I’ve stumbled into a merry little band of expats doing A-quality work in an otherwise B-level market. I think it comes down to culture.

For all the hype, LA isn’t as much of a film town. Oh sure, it’s the center of the universe for movie making, but per capita, there are more art house movie theaters and independent video stores in Portland. And what that tells me is that LA cares more about the business of film than the art of it.

As for New York, it’s the center of the universe for culture in this country, so you can’t argue that people there don’t care. The problem is that New York is so overwhelming that no matter how much you care, you have to deal with the reality of maneuvering in such a huge city. When I was in film school at NYU, I’d take my Bolex to a nearby park to shoot tests, but I’d rarely get my tripod open before some security guard would show up, demanding to see my film permit.

What Portland has is a community of people who care about the quality of their work without having to live in a city that squishes their soul out of them. That’s why good people move here. And probably why so many good people don’t feel the need to leave.

I’m thrilled to be in Portland, and I’m a little ashamed that I thought working here was going to be a step down. Sure, I’ll miss seeing 200 people when I put out a casting call for a one-legged dwarf who plays mariachi guitar. But that’s a small price to pay.

What a one-year-old taught me about direct response advertising.

My daughter just learned how to share. She’s one.

After a year of taking, it suddenly occurred to her that she can give. And she enjoys it.

Now in the middle of eating, she’ll hold out a Cheerio in her grubby, food-and-slobber encrusted fingers for me or the dogs.

My first reaction was not as honest as the dogs’. I pretended to take the food, chewing my ersatz morsel with melodramatic pleasure.

My daughter knew what I was doing. It wasn’t long before I noticed that she would offer to share with the dogs a little more often and with me a little less.

I know my daughter is an absolute genius, but I’m willing to concede that most kids do the same thing. Children pick up on stuff. They know when their parents are being insincere.

Which got me to thinking.

If we all had parents who pretended to take the mangled Cheerio, we all learned that our generosity was not truly appreciated. Would this explain why so many of us are so reluctant to give?

More relevant to our business, would this explain why consumers are often so suspicious of advertising?

Follow me on this.

I try to give. My generosity is not appreciated. I come to believe that generosity in general is not appreciated. So I learn that it’s not appropriate to appreciate generosity.

Years later, I’m watching TV and on comes a commercial message that contains a ‘special offer’.

“Hmm. How generous,” I think. “What am I to make of that?”

So now I’m at a crossroads. The next time my daughter offers me a Cheerio, do I react sincerely, showing her how much I appreciate her generosity and thereby setting her on the path toward a rewarding life full of love and happiness, moderated only a little by the occasional disappointment she’ll inevitably experience when the ‘special offer’ she falls for turns out not to be all that special?

Or do I pretend to take the Cheerio, breaking her little heart and setting her up to become a cynical consumer, unwilling to believe that the people putting out marketing communications could possibly be motivated by anything other than a desire to fool her into buying something she doesn’t need for more than she really ought to pay?

It’s an easy decision. That Cheerio is kind of nasty.

The Jordan verdict

Today, Lt.-Col. Jordan was cleared of charges related to abuse at Abu Ghraib. Eleven soldiers have been convicted of carrying out abuses, but nobody in charge has been held responsible.

In other words, the soldiers were acting on their own. Nobody was monitoring their actions. They had the opportunity, the means, and the desire to abuse the prisoners, and had pictures not come to light, not only would the public not know about the abuses, nobody further up the chain of command would know, either.

That raises a couple of interesting questions. First, what kind of an army is it where the commanding officers don’t know what the men and women in their command are up to?

Second, how seriously is our system taking the rights of prisoners when soldiers have the opportunity -— to say nothing of the desire -— to abuse prisoners with impunity.

But the third and probably most troubling question is whether the results of Lt.-Col. Jordan’s case indicate a command structure that puts inordinate responsibility and opportunity into the hands of 22-year-old armed men and women with no significant oversight.

When you run an army, any army, one of the first things you do with a new recruit is you discipline him or her. You inculcate him or her with the rules and regulations that govern proper behavior. And you never hand that person a weapon until you know that he or she will use it properly.

So I find it troubling that Lt.-Col. Jordan -— as the officer in charge of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison -— was not responsible for the discipline of the soldiers under his command.

Nobody was.

A million and a half people, all of whom are armed and trained to kill, and nobody’s in charge of them?

I find that impossible to believe.

There’s another possibility. Maybe the army actually does do a good job of disciplining its soldiers. Maybe soldiers really are trained to know what acceptable behavior is.

And maybe what the soldiers at Abu Ghraib did was actually considered acceptable. Maybe they were actually trained to perform heinous acts of indignity on prisoners.

Yes, that’s hard to believe, too. We live in a society that values individual liberty, don’t we? A system where the accused is innocent until proven guilty. A system of checks and balances that keep the powerful from oppressing the weak.

Given those two choices -— that either the army is effective at disciplining its soldiers or it isn’t -— I know which one seems more likely.

Especially considering one more nugget of information. The fact that Lt.-Col. Jordan wasn’t acquitted of all charges.

Lt.-Col. Jordan, who was responsible for the discipline of the men and women who abused prisoners under his care, was found guilty of disobeying an order not to discuss the investigation into the abuse scandal with others.

This crime carries a potential penalty of five years in prison.

Now that’s what I call discipline.

Portland update

So many people asked to see pictures of my wife being pregnant that I had to send a follow up.

Unfortunately, my camera is broken.

That's okay. I can still show you a picture of Ruthann's belly:

)

Oh wait. That's mine.

Hers hasn't really come in yet. But her boobs are getting
bigger:

?

That's the side view. Here's the front:

ooOO
beforeafter

Mine are getting bigger, too:


..oo
beforeafter