The Work That Made Me: Tom Vaughan-Mountford
Tom Vaughan-Mountford is production director of JMS Group, a long-established name in DRTV commercial production. Tom gets nostalgic over 1980’s public information films, retro kids’ TV and some of his formative production projects.
The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…
Tom> Every kid in the 1970’s and ‘80s suffered nightmares at the hands of Central Office of Information films. The COI ad forever seared into my mind is ‘Leave the Pavement for Pedestrians’, 1982.
In the ad, a guy bumps a sporty red Rover 2800 onto the curb and cockily walks away. Chaos ensues as pedestrians snake around the inconsiderately parked car, an elderly lady stumbles and her basket of groceries tumbles to the ground.
There’s nothing remarkable about the ad – it’s quite pedestrian (boom boom) – but at the time my dad drove a near identical Rover. I was too young to wrap my head around the possibility there was more than one red car in the country, and it troubled me greatly that the TV was somehow reaching into our home to deliver a stern personal reprimand.
The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…
Tom> Knightmare. It was a kids’ adventure game show on ITV during the late '80s/early '90s. The gameplay was loosely based on Dungeons and Dragons and its production mixed early CGI with greenscreen. The production company – Broadsword – was based in my home city of Norwich and it shot the series at ITV’s Magdalen Street studios. It messed with my head that the cool show I’d watch after school was being produced just ten minutes up the road. It also had a badass theme tune!
The creative work (film/album/game/ad/album/book/poem etc) that I keep revisiting…
Tom> If we’re talking about sheer quantity of hours I’ve invested in it, then the creative work I keep revisiting is Call of Duty. From architectural design, weapons, clothing, music, voice casting… Call of Duty has a mind-boggling attention to detail across the franchise, which makes it tremendously immersive. The legacy game Call of Duty Cold War got 1980’s Soviet-chic absolutely on-point.
My first professional project…
Tom> In the late ‘90s I did the post-production of a corporate video to recruit franchisees to a new coffee shop brand. I’m not sure how many people ever saw it; the brand was short-lived as the owner ended up in court on firearms offences.
The piece of work (ad/music video/ platform…) that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…
Tom> I produced several TV commercials for a client that performed well above expectation. The creative was super-simple, messaging was on-point, and the campaigns delivered the sales. There was then a change of marketing team at the client, and we were shown the door. They brought a new agency and production company across their TV work and blew north of £150k shooting an aspirational campaign to reposition the brand. Big-name DP shooting 35mm, several days of filming, premium locations – no expense spared. The campaign launched with a whimper and was shelved after a few weeks on air. It angered me because the new spot was a vanity project that had thrown aside years of accumulated knowledge about the client’s customer-base; the very insights that had been key to making the inexpensive campaigns work so effectively. I vowed to never let creative ego lead me away from solid commercial data.
The piece of work (ad/music video/ platform…) that still makes me jealous…
Tom> I’m a huge fan of long-form narrative ads (two-three minutes) because they allow themselves the time to breathe and build more character around the message. I’m especially drawn to humour, or creative that takes a seemingly unrelated route to the final message.
The World’s Biggest Asshole – Donate Life
I’m in awe of the character development in such a short space of time, within the first 26 seconds I’m rooting for the guy to drop dead!
The Ink Beneath the Blue – New Zealand Police
I’ve produced videos and TV spots for recruitment campaigns, and the clients have almost always steered them in a similar (vanilla) direction to attempt universal appeal. This New Zealand police recruitment campaign takes an original angle, creating a softly understated and relatable campaign.
The creative project that changed my career…
Tom> The first TV commercial I produced, ‘The General George Autumn Sale’ changed the trajectory of my work. I can’t recall how the project found its way to us, but it was an ultra-basic photo-montage commercial for a vinyl flooring retailer in Aberdeen. I borrowed a Digi Beta deck to master the commercial and ended up having to call someone in engineering at ITV and charm them into explaining how to use it.
The work that I’m proudest of…
Tom> It’s About Time for Fine Watch Club. In the grand scheme of things, it was a micro-budget commercial. We shot almost everything in the production office or the car park. There were no professional actors, just the client and our own team. Props were sourced from local charity shops. The project was powered by everyone’s enthusiasm to make it work.
Fine Watch Club initially ran a small test campaign that proved so successful that the media buy was scaled up and - with a couple of additional cuts of the commercial - the campaign has been airing for ten months with airtime booked through to next spring. The inexpensive ad has become the single biggest driver of enquiries for the client.
I was involved in this, and it makes me cringe…
Tom> I had an eccentric client who always came up against roadblocks with Clearcast. They had little proof of the efficacy of their product; I think a focus group of just a dozen people. To circumvent hurdles, the client resorted to dreaming up ever more bizarre creative treatments and handing them to me for production.
The last ad I produced was a clipart-style animation of a Chinese sensei discussing the product with a helium-voiced grasshopper. So far, so terrible. As if the ad weren’t already toeing the line of weird cultural appropriation, the client also chose to arrange the voiceover for the sensei as they knew a guy who was ‘good at voices’…
The ad was diabolical in every respect, yet the client scoured Europe for dirt-cheap airtime on English-language channels that could clear the copy in-house. I don’t know how it all worked out, but I never heard from them again.
The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…
Tom> A couple of weeks ago I directed a yet to air commercial for a food delivery app. We were briefed to make a big impact without a tremendous amount of money on the table. The creative team developed an approach that makes takeaway food the star of a saucy cable-era porn teaser. Throughout the shoot we collectively had a feeling of ‘This is too weird to be for real, surely there must be some rules about producing something this outlandish?’ Time will tell.
