shots Awards 2011: Audience Award Winner

The shots Audience Award was the only one of the ten categories that enabled everyone to get in on the act, via Twitter, of voting. Chosen from the three categories of TV Commercial of the Year, Interactive Campaign of the Year and Best Branded Short of the Year, the Audience Award was, initially, a hard fought battle. And then it wasn’t. Because after only a few days Xbox 360 Dance Central Out Dance Kylie shimmied its way to the head of the poll and proceeded to strut its gold hotpant- wearing stuff on the top of the podium with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast.

The three-minute internet film, created through McCann Erickson London, was directed by 2AM’s Becky Martin and, amazingly, was her first ever commercial shoot. But Martin certainly isn’t a stranger to cameras. She has, since 1998, helmed a host of British TV comedy shows including the BAFTA-winning Peep Show. But how did she find her first advertising experience? “As a first commercial I hit the jackpot,” she laughs. “Because it was an internet campaign I didn’t have the pressure you would normally get from a TV spot and it could, within reason, be any length. McCann was also open to me looking at the brief and adding things in if I wanted to and Mike [Oughton] and Paul [Cohen, creatives] wanted it to be a collaboration.”

The film follows a man who has taken his love of the Xbox game Dance Central to extremes, copying Kylie’s wardrobe, assuming her name and, eventually, holding her hostage as he takes to the stage in her place. “The key to it,” she explains, “was that you couldn’t think he was some closet, camp Kylie fanatic, but that he was a bloke who was a gamer and had just taken the game a step too far.”

It helped that Kylie was up for it. “She was brilliant,” proclaims Martin, “though the first thing I heard was that she had a sore throat and there’s that bit where she has to scream. We tried a few different takes where she didn’t yell but it wasn’t working and in the end she was really game and just screamed.”

Globe-trotting

There was a two-day shoot in London for all the scenes with the main character in the launderette/bar/flat, and then it was off to Helsinki to film just before a Kylie concert. The team were allowed to use four backing dancers and film on the stage before the crowd entered the stadium. “That was the hardest part,” admits Martin. “If we didn’t have [the concert scene] then we didn’t have a believable premise and although Kylie’s people were great, we had minimal time – probably about 20 minutes – to shoot the entire performance. That was tough because everything else was sort of in my comfort zone because it was the same way I would approach something from my comedy shows.”

Martin made her way to directing via the BBC where she was a script supervisor/production assistant, though directing was always her goal. “At the time the BBC was very fixed and I didn’t think there was any way I would become a director,” she says. But after writing a sketch for Comedy Nation which got made, and then being asked to direct her next effort, she was in. “After that I thought I’d go back to my day job,” she admits, “but I’ve never really looked back.”