Into the Library with Tim Godsall
We don’t often play favourites at Little Black Book, but rules are there to be broken.
Tim Godsall directed my favourite ad.
Southern Comfort’s ‘Beach’ is perfect. It came out in the heady days of 2012 - my first year in advertising and first year at Little Black Book - and has just stuck with me ever since. The bassline! The belly! The good boy by his side! That shoulder dip, I kid you not, is the stuff of LBB lore, consumed on many a mildly hungover Friday afternoon in the office crowded around a laptop screen. You'll have to read on to see it for yourselves. Its follow-on, 'Karate', is also immortal.
So, I am thrilled to finally get the chance to feature Tim in our Into the Library series, where we dive deep into a back catalogue of work scented with European cheese, fragrant deodorants, and fruity whisky liquors.
Leerdammer Cheese
2004
A friend of mine was working in Switzerland on this cheese account, and let me write and direct a little campaign for it. There was no budget — Untitled paid for the shoot on spec. I don’t think it ever really aired, but it got the attention of the best creatives in my native Canada, who suddenly started sending me projects.
Agency: McCann Zurich
Production: Untitled Films
Worldwide Short Film Festival - Good cop, bad cop
This was one of the first proper jobs I shot. The creative team, Dave Douglass and Pete Breton, had liked the Leerdammer thing. ‘Confess bitch, nice hair’ is such a great line… I’m surprised it doesn’t get used more often in marketing. Anyway, this won a bunch of ad prizes in places like Cannes, and I suddenly started getting projects from all over.
Agency: Taxi Advertising Toronto
Production: Untitled Films
Skittles - Songs of Praise
The simple, bold, campaign idea was to parody well-known British TV shows with ‘fruity mouthed’ gaffes — and it was so much more provocative than anything being done in North America at the time. I remember the client in the PPM saying she had a concern about the language, and thinking ‘here we go’… but then she just wanted to make sure we didn’t soften it or go halfway while shooting. I remember scribbling ‘work here more.’ on a notepad.
Agency: Chiat Day London
Production: Independent London
Starburst - Tashi
2006
This was the first time I worked with Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal. We had some drama with the male actor lying about the validity of his passport (we had to smuggle him into Mexico) and the sound equipment not working on the beach (we had to ADR the actors later in a studio in NY), but this one always made me laugh.
Agency: Chiat Day NY
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
Holiday Inn - Unicycle
2006
I think there were two official scripts for this campaign, but the creative director, Roger Camp, was incredibly open to experimentation and improv, and we found three actors who were brilliant at it, so we ended up just basically ‘making up’ around eight ads by just messing about on set. The Unicorn one was pure improv, and a great example of what controlled chaos (with two cameras rolling and skilled actors) can deliver with a brave agency/client. One of the actors, Nat Faxon, went on to win an Oscar for screenwriting a couple of years later.
Agency: Fallon
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
Xbox - Standoff
2006
This one was a big deal for me. I had to bid against some of the fanciest directors in the world, and I really wanted to do it because it was so different from anything I’d done. At the time, 72 was tiny, and the entire creative department was on this job (Glenn Cole, John Boiler, Jason Norcross and Bryan Rowles). I pitched them a re-write of the script which they liked, so I guess they were stuck with having me direct it (in spite of the proper big time directors chasing the job). I was really happy with how it turned out, but then Microsoft decided to kill it due to a Senate inquest into violence in video games (the ad was not violent, but… whatever). In the end, someone within their marketing arm decided to stick it online (against internal orders), and it got out in the world unofficially on this relatively new thing called YouTube.
Agency: 72andSunny
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
Old Spice - Jungle Wilderness
2011
I shot a few Old Spice ads back at that time, but always had a fondness for this one.
We made it in New Zealand, and an animatronic crocodile was brought in from LA, but on the tech scout, it became clear it was completely unusable. It was a crude, crappy, mega-puppet. The Mill ended up making us a CG crocodile. For some reason, the final beat of this ad is stuck in my head permanently. Whenever someone says "that’s amazing" (about anything at all), it triggers a little thought bubble: ‘amazing… I know’.
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
DirecTV - Opulence
2011
I got blacklisted by the agency after this job. The problem started with the fact that the main actor was wearing a turtleneck. The creative director showed up on set about mid-afternoon, and wanted to change the actor into a white shirt with a black tie. I said it would be crazy to change the wardrobe at that point since we’d been shooting (with officially approved wardrobe) for several hours and already had tons of good footage. He didn’t like that answer, or me. The troubles resumed in the edit, when the aforementioned CD hated the cut that the team (John Kallus and Luis Romero) and I liked. I convinced him to allow the edit to go forward, but there was tension. No projects came to me from Grey after that. About a year later, I got an email from Tor Myhren (then the top creative at the agency, and now the top creative at Apple) saying they’d parted ways with the CD who hated me, and that he’d been annoyed to find out that I’d been ‘blacklisted’ at his agency.
Agency: Grey NY
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
AXE - Brainy Girl and Flirty Girl
2012
I got the scripts sent to me right before the Fourth of July long weekend. I was in LA and about to shoot something, but I really wanted to get this campaign and I knew that London directors did their agency ‘pitch meetings’ in person. I decided to fly to London and meet with the creative director, David Kolbusz. I did the 10-hour flight, got a cab into town, had a shower and then met Kolbusz for breakfast, shared my thoughts over too much caffeine, and then he said something along the lines of, ‘Great. But why’d you fly all the way to London? I was going to give you this job no matter what’. I loved shooting it, and it was the start of a relationship with Kolbusz that has endured for over a decade — well, actually he blacklisted me for a little while too, but that was a misunderstanding over a dice game in Torrance and it’s all cleared up now.
Agency: BBH London
Production: Biscuit Filmworks UK
Southern Comfort - Beach
2012
This was with Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal once they’d landed at WKNY (along with Nick Kaplan and Jeff Dryer). This was such a crazy simple idea — just find someone who has a certain presence and have them walk down the beach radiating ‘comfort in their own skin’. We cast all over and found a bartender from outside Prague who’d never acted. He had no idea why were flying him to Barcelona and paying him good money for such a seemingly dumb enterprise, but he just rolled with it.
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy NY
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
Southern Comfort - Karate
2013
A continuation of the campaign. Found the guy in Berlin, shot the ad in Toronto. There was an official script, which worked out well… but I asked the guy if he’d be up for an experimental idea, since he was a Karate instructor in real life and I thought it might be cool to have him just show some suave Karate moves in his apron. He was fine with it, although I think he thought it was all pretty stupid.
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy NY
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
AXE - Soulmates
2014
Another Kolbusz project. We shot in Budapest, where I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of days before the shoot, experiencing extreme tooth pain. I googled the location of a nearby dental clinic and was waiting at their door when they opened. They spoke no English, and I spoke no Hungarian… but pained gesticulating and brandishing of a credit card got me into a dental chair, where a root canal was apparently performed. Pain levels went way down, and I went on to have very pleasant shoot with the BBH gang (Gary McCreadie, Wesley Hawes, Matt Fitch, Mark Lewis).
Agency: BBH London
Production: Biscuit Filmworks UK
Esurance - Breaking Bad
2015
This was a Super Bowl ad. They always have celebrities, but they often seem pretty dumb. This one seemed smart. I liked the way it worked out. Also, it forced me to finally watch 'Breaking Bad' so that I wouldn’t get caught out as the one person who’d never seen it. I’m always dragging my heels on whatever is the big thing in pop culture, and celebrity projects sometimes have the side effect of forcing me to catch up on a phenomenon the rest of the world is already steeped in.
Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago
Production: Anonymous Content
Squarespace - Bridges
2018
Kolbusz again, after he’d landed at Wieden in New York. This was a weird, simple idea that seemed like it would stand apart from the cacophony of the Super Bowl. Fun to shoot (especially with all the smart ancillary materials/socials). Jeff Bridges was a delight. Led to a couple more fun Squarespace projects, with Keanu Reeves and then Winona Ryder, that were client directed (with David Lee as the creative director).
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy New York
Production: Anonymous Content
Halo Top - Swiping
2019
We found a sardonic actor to deliver hard truths to innocent children from his ice cream truck pulpit. Shot four of them, and they turned out nicely. It was also interesting to work with 72andSunny again now that they were a multi-trillion dollar global mega agency with thousands of employees… a mere decade and a half after we shot the ill-fated Xbox thing (which I believe was its first TV ad).
Agency: 72andSunny
Production: Anonymous Content
Just Egg - Wayne
2022
Mythology is a little agency in New York started by Anthony Sperduti, who I’ve known for a long time. He and his team (Kim Haxton and Audrey Attal) sent this campaign which had such smart writing, and was going to be voiced by J.B. Smoove. We ended up doing some very good celebrity ones as well (Jake Gyllenhaal, Serena Williams), but this was the original and had a purity to it.
Agency: Mythology
Production: Anonymous Content / Merchant Films
Firehouse Subs - Derek
2024
I was planning on having a vacation, and then David Kolbusz sent me a funny campaign for Firehouse Subs and asked if I’d be interested in a shoot-cation instead. He’s now running an agency in New York called Orchard Creative, and Firehouse was its new client. Not only was the idea simple, insane, and smart, but Kolbusz promised to give me a secret password for 50% off all subs (I must be saying it wrong though, because when I tried it the guy at the cash register called the cops).
Agency: Orchard Creative
Production: Anonymous Content / Merchant Films
