Ivana Bobic

0:04[Applause]

0:11hello hi so I'm a director and I work in the UK with a wonderful company called riff raff and hopefully some of them are here - heck yes they're here to heckle me. That's great and I make a kind of variety of projects from ranging from music videos to fashion films and commercials and most of them are short that's the kind of thing they have in common.

0:34So the thing that I wanted to talk about tonight is one particular project called for a very wonderful charity called coppaFeel and I was asked to collaborate with a crater called Lucy Aston it folds seven and the brief was to make a cinema advert for the charity to raise awareness for breast cancer and their main message was about early detection and that it was an issue that affected everyone so it was something that was quite a big challenge to think well how do you speak to everyone you know it's men women of all ages that you've got to kind of reach out to and on such a serious matter as well. So that was definitely tricky so I'm going to show you the film first because I think it will make more sense if we do it that way around and then I'll talk about how we how we came up with it hope snap paws touch baby jiko juggle straight up rope fill hole tickle tackle touch cut bounce me squeeze squeeze smash push press tech step touch trust your touch pop a feel for freely mindless takes boobs to seven no 300 so that was the ad and I can tell you the brief was to trust your touch which was something about making people feel comfortable with their own bodies and amazingly that's something that not many of us feel so it was about trusting your hands to check if there's any lumps or abnormalities or discharges or things that you should feel kind of comfortable understanding and and also about thinking about how amazing your sense of touch is so so visually I started to kind of think about what hands do and what those actions look like in in close-up almost kind of from the hands point of view and one of my key influences was a film by godfrey reggio which was called the visitors and got me thinking about how hands move and the amazing kind of complexity of the movement when you really look at them close up like that they're kind of almost like aliens and this was one of the things that kind of droves the the aesthetic and the kind of idea for the film because really with for this the brief was pretty open apart from that we had to raise this awareness about it. And we kind of started to think about the way that we're going to talk to this audience and it challenged us also to think about how you talk to young women and it's you know really important that you don't make something that looks twee or that's sweet or you know to kind of condescending because we wanted to do something that kind of balanced color and style and sense of humor and had a kind of tactile quality so you start thinking about how things feel when you watch them and you know how a basketball looks like really close up or the feeling of stroking some fur or some sort of tactile approach to it and that took us on to kind of thinking about words and we worked with a copywriter to create a sort of a pattern of words that describe things that you can do with your hands and you know some of them are kind of lovely silly wonderful words and other ones are more serious.

4:23And it what we wanted to kind of find is some sort of meaningful flow between them so telling some kind of story and also thinking about rhymes so what we wanted to avoid was having a great big shopping list of words that that described things. So it was more about kind of working to a beat so now I can show you one of the early tests so you can hear me in a moment doing some really dodgy rapping to some reference images and play point poke Pat pull pluck pause touch fiddle twiddle jiggle juggle touch bounce feel so this was can hold a template for it in the end tickle tack very simple it was quite a simple test but actually it gave us the chance to start taking it apart and synching actually how long do these shots you need to be able to understand these actions really quickly because some of them are so fast and so then we decided to do some more testing and again these kind of get more and more embarrassing as we go along so I'm very happy to show them play point poke Pat pull pluck pause I mean it's a pretty good pause big orgy when you look at it. And so with all the kind of testing out of the way we started to think well we need to we need to get on with casting and the casting was incredible I mean it was actually chaotic because we had a variety of amazing celebrities we had people from loved Island we had the boo bet who are the copper feels incredible like gang of women who support support them.

6:22But we also needed to cast some cats and this was probably a new experience for for me in terms of like the way that you describe a cat that Orlando got the job because he was apparently going to be very expressive and Hudson was very confident which I thought yeah what I want is a really confident cat that's definitely what we want but actually these are some of the outtakes and most of the time they're just sort of chewing things and looking crazy and his Hudson he spent most of the time doing that we had about two seconds of usable footage which is luckily all we needed because he was just chewing so that was Hudson's great debut seriously that's that's pretty much what he did so yeah and then then it also kind of got into the world of the prop so we had something like 34 or 36 shots to do and that's that's a lot of shots and a lot of props and a lot of chaos when you think about it it all kind of seems quite innocent until you have to get all these things together.

7:41So it was kind of looking in minut detail looking at kind of the right radio and the right dough and you know testing dough like yeah it looks like dough it's gonna be fine and some of them were doughnuts that needed to have the right amount of jam in them. So that when you squeeze them the jam comes out and you know there's a lot of fun but also just I can't kind of stress enough the the amount of chaos that was going on when we were testing all of these things.

8:05But there was also a kind of jelly gate incident which we had one of the key props was this jelly and it was going to be kind of boob-shaped and we worked with some amazing people professionals who had cast this jelly mold that was breast and it was going to be pink and it was going to be a whole thing that was gonna be in the advert and we tested the jelly I mean this is this is slow-motion jelly which I thought was pretty exciting and mesmerizing like yeah that's good that's a good jelly and then we came to the shoot thinking yeah we've nailed the jelly it's gonna be fine and not only is it tiny but this is that is the level of wobble and we thought that's not gonna work that is just not enough wobble and then somebody went out and fashioned this one and that was just scary it was like a really frightening monster jelly and the thing that worked amazingly enough was some jellies from a pot which right at the end of the sheet just when they were about to kind of pull the lights were like no put the jelly on the plate but those jellies on the plate and you can see it's apparently the height that gives you that successful bubble so so that was the kind of jelly gate solved but with a lot of a lot of things going wrong and then it kind of comes to the post-production section which actually for me is one of the most creative parts of the job.

9:44And I love to work with sound design in the Edit and that can kind of bring another level of chaos you know when you don't just have the thing that you plan to do you start to kind of take things apart again and experiment and do something kind of is quite unusual and because of this rhyming that we'd invented we were kind of started to be forced into this very complex structure and and also we had to find someone to do the vo and both me and Lucy the creative we became obsessed with speech to building the voiceover and she said no quite a lot of times and and eventually said yes just probably to shut us up.

10:22But it changed everything because she kind of understood how to how to do the voice-over properly and how to give it a kind of pace and a rhythm that that really kind of brought it to life and the Edit was kind of wrangled into shape with a lot of like tests music.

10:38And it definitely went through a kind of messy phase and part of that was also commissioning the music because we'd created this really complicated structure with this rhyming we had to do all of our own music. And that's actually me doing some Cashin so we had kind of gone through music libraries and we tried to Commission stuff with composers and it just wasn't it wasn't really easy as putting some music onto the onto the edit.

11:06So the sound designer also admitted that he was a drummer and I was like can I do it you're the one that's gonna do this and he kind of made it made it all happen so with a bit of love and and that's and that's one thing I didn't talk about much. Actually.

11:22But it's because of its charity status and and nature there's there's not much of a budget on these kind of projects but there's there's a lot of love and I think in a weird way it kind of made us made us very focused and made us kind of push through to to make something interesting so you know getting the sound designer to do the the composition wasn't necessarily the normal way of doing things but he he really made it wonderful and then.

11:46This is this is the surround sound cinema mix which for me is also one of the most exciting parts of it but kind of celebrating that.

11:55And then in the 11th hour we had this unexpected well for me it was unexpected but this issue with sensors about having a nipple in the film. And I didn't really understand because I was like well there's male nipples in it I don't know why we can't have this one but apparently no we couldn't have it in and so there was a lot of tooing and froing and there was some amazing backing from from all sorts of people fighting and saying now we've got to do this we've got to have it end yeah Ronnie if you're here thank you for doing that.

12:28But I suppose you know a little bit about what happened next but we couldn't quite imagine the extent of what happened and we started to kind of get this trickle of news so we the the advert was meant to be just for the cinema but they got wind of it on on very early morning GMTV and they decided to show the the ad there.

12:50And it soon became the first-ever nipple on daytime TV which is such a unusual thing to happen in this day and age but it did and actually it was number one on the news that day beating Trump trying to blow iran so that was that was obviously an unexpected achievement but for the charity it was such a huge win because it got people going onto their website and it got the calls out there. And it was quite a sort of straightforward situation where suddenly you go okay yeah of course of course that was the way to do it.

13:32But we didn't necessarily know what's gonna happen that way but and then that brings me in in the meantime while I was doing this very chaotic film I was also making a an art film which I'm not going to go into in any great detail but the lovely guys that it's nice that also featured it. So if you want to watch it you can watch it on there.

13:53So we're gonna skip that one but what I wanted to tell you is thank you and also to thank it's nice that forum for having me here.

14:01But it's a pleasure to share the work and and talk about this kind of weird process that we went through and also to show you celebrating at Festival so that's that's it. That's everything thanks [Applause]