5 Minutes with… Jon Collins

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. It was necessity that led Jon Collins to take a job as a runner in a post-production house – and now he’s leading the charge when it comes to invention in advertising. In addition to the offices in London and New York, he has just overseen the opening of their latest office in LA. LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with Jon to find out more.

LBB> You’re ‘President of Integrated Advertising’ – what does integrated advertising mean to you?

JC> We’ve gone from that siloed model of agencies, production companies, VFX houses, post, sound design working in a chain. Some areas or projects still operate like that, but increasingly different players are having direct relationships  with each other. We may be directing a commercial, working directly with an agency but with no production company involved. We’ve even been working directly with brands. Likewise there are agencies that have done their own VFX or production companies have their own in-house editors. There are different solutions. I think it’s given a different energy to the whole industry. It has removed some of the stability that we all rely on to navigate the landscape. With the siloed model it’s pretty clear who you select as your clients. When you break that model it throws up tonnes of questions but also tonnes of opportunities. 

With this new model we’ve been developing hugely different skillsets and buying in others so that we can be relevant in this new phase.

LBB> So what sort of integrated projects has Framestore been involved in?

JC> We have done second screen events, like Coca-Cola’s Polar Bowl we did for the Super Bowl. We had developed digital puppeteering technology and took it to some agencies, one of whom was Wieden + Kennedy. It just so happened that they were bringing back the polar bears for the Super Bowl of 2012. They saw the digital puppeteering and real-time animation as a way of driving people to their social media sites. They had traditional TV spots, but of course there were people sitting watching it with their laptops open.

We created two polar bears for their Facebook page. They were puppeteered live and reacted to what was happening in the game, jumping around and Vogue-ing when Madonna came on. It went on over the whole four hours. Even Coca-Cola were staggered by the metrics they got from that – they had 9 million people engaging with it, for an average of about 28 minutes. 

 

We’ve even done installations, like the Valentino Retrospective we did. We also worked with McLaren. They perceived their brand image to be clinical and disciplined. Our brief was to warm up their image. Our guys came up with the idea for an animated series starring Jensen Button and Lewis Hamilton as the main characters, which we wrote and animated. 

 

That’s led to other things, like partnering with R/GA and Beats by Dr Dre. Not only did we shoot the live action commercial but we’re also working  with them on a range of exciting new innovative ideas. 

We’re not throwing away the 30 second spot – we’re really proud of that stuff, we’ve just done a lovely spot for Galaxy with Audrey Hepburn. The traditional model still works for us, it’s just that it’s not the sole provider of the work anymore.

LBB> With Framestore’s heritage as a post house, research and development and the ability to stay on top of new technology has always been important. Does the post sector have a particular advantage in this new non-siloed model?

 

JC> I think there’s definitely something in it. We’re having conversations with different people who don’t always know who Framestore are, and that can actually be a huge advantage. I always used to love the fact that our reputation precedes us in a lot of places, but strictly speaking people would also have pre-conceived ideas about who we are and what we can do. The truth is that in the last two or three years we’ve changed dramatically.  

But right from the conception of the company we’ve always existed at the intersection of art and technology, using both to solve a problem. 

The beauty of integrated advertising is not that you’re selling people particular things, it’s about coming up with specific solutions to peoples’ problems. It’s a journey that we’ve taken from being thought of as artistic technicians towards becoming creative problem solvers. 

LBB> Talking of taking the initiative, I’m interested in the work you did with Arena media about neuroscience and effectiveness and post. Can you tell me about that?

JC> We are passionate about the work we do and think that comes across in the quality we uphold. But rather than just trust in our gut instinct we wanted more solid evidence in the value of visual effects. We engaged in some research following new developments in the field of neuroscience. The research was to determine whether our instinct was right. We always suspected that the better the visuals, the more striking the recollection and engagement you’d have with your brand. The research showed that if you can keep a viewer in a world and stimulate those senses they will not only engage more deeply with your brand but their recollection of that positive experience will sustain for far longer. However, if you overstimulate the brain in a negative way your brain goes into lockdown and the opposite happens – you try to expunge it from your memory. There’s a limit, like anything.  

To engage people you need to keep them in that world. They have to suspend their disbelief. Anything that you do badly will jolt them out of that. The research groups each saw a different version of the same spot with different levels of finishing. The better the quality of the effects, the more they completely believed it. People are quite visually mature now so their eyes can read whether something is right or not fairly well. If it’s not done well, it can jar. The theory is as soon as they’re jolted out of it, the less impactful it is and the less that the experience is retained in the memory. We’re looking into doing further research in that area as there are new advances all the time. 

LBB> Do you think the research validates the role of post?

JC> One of the reasons for the research is that we’re very proud of the work we do and want to ensure it’s as good as it can be. A lot of the time we’re frustrated because deadlines are truncated and there are conflicting agendas that can lead to a reduced amount of time crafting an image. From our point of view that’s frustrating because we want it to look as good as it possibly can. We understand that there are different drivers involved in making a commercial but I think very often people think the finish isn’t really very important compared with the idea or the cut. We agree that these things are supremely important but one shouldn’t undervalue the visual effects or the look of the piece. It’s the final 10 to 15 per cent of where the premium quality comes in. That’s what can make the difference as to whether people engage with the work and remember it in a positive light. The visual effects need to be given parity with the other elements. It’s not just a vanity thing from my point of view, it’s an effectiveness issue.

LBB> How did you get into the industry in the first place?

JC> I did a degree in media but at the start of 80s and there weren’t that many media degrees in the UK. It was at a college on the south coast of England that later became Bournemouth University. In the early 80s it had to be ‘English and Media’ as no-one was offering an Honours Degree in just Media. After that I came up to London. At the time I thought was going to be a director. But I had just landed in London and was heavily broke and had a friend who already worked in post. I thought I’d start as a runner and try and move over into directing. 30 years later I never quite managed to move across.

It was a lot of fun and in truth I’ve never had a day when I thought this wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.  I went through running, then went to the technical side, and became one of the first post production producers. The industry was really evolving. When I started in the mid-80s video was pretty much in its infancy and there wasn’t much knowledge about it. Even in that sense things were evolving. Back then post really was about the finishing of a spot. There were things like Mirage which could wrap a screen into a shape, but there wasn’t really much in the way of visual effects and significant CG.

In 1993 I was poached by Soho 601 to be head of production, and worked for a lady called Claire Timms who’s an industry force of nature. Two years after that I went to be head of production at Framestore in London. Ten years ago I went across to set up Framestore New York. I didn’t get into the industry specifically to do this kind of thing but as it evolved I grew with it. And I would say, as exciting as it was in the early days, this time now is more exciting. 

The kinds of projects we’ve been working on over the last 18 months have been phenomenal but even that’s just scratching the surface, so God only knows what the future looks like!

LBB> What do you think Framestore’s going to become?

JC> That’s a great question. Even now I don’t call it a post house – I stopped doing that about five years ago. We’ve changed into a new kind of company altogether. We’re so heavily involved in the whole process. 

A few years ago we developed an art department to work on a pitch for VFX on a movie. But now,  we’ve got one of the world’s best art departments. Hollywood studios come to us not just for VFX but because they want help developing the whole look and design of a film. That means we’re now often doing work on a film before even the director is on board.

On top of that we’re using the art department in different ways and we’re scaling that. For example last year we collaborated with Gawker’s science fiction platform, io9. We did an online, crowd-sourced storytelling project. We would post images from our art department and that would go out to their community, who would come back with ideas for the story. That then led to other opportunities because brands engage with Gawker and io9, and they saw the possibilities in this. 

When we started the art department, it was a conscious effort not to be ‘post’ anything, but to be ‘pre’ - to be involved in a project at the very start. That has then led to different opportunities for integrated advertising. It started in the film world as a means to an end and then it’s taken on a life of its own.

Another example of who we are as a company and where we’re going as a company is our project with the publishing company Penguin. We’re working with Razorbill, their young adult arm. We were having this conversation about the future of publishing and that turned into a collaboration with them to develop a property. This will start with a book coming out in November, called The Creature Department.

My part in all of this is to make sure that not only do we have of all these opportunities but we also have to run a business. We can’t just do it as some sort of speculative golden future; it has to have a valid footing. That’s the business part of it, but it truly is an exciting time.