On a Roll with MJ Delaney

Her spoof of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ homage to New York went viral faster than bird flu, her batch of witty spots for Aldi stores became award-winning cult faves, and she’s also directed a sensitive, serious film for children’s charity Plan. Is there any end in sight to this relatively rookie director’s talents? David Knight suspects not...

In the summer of 2010 a funny thing happened to MJ Delaney. A video that she co-wrote and directed, spoofing Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ monstrously huge global hit Empire State Of Mind, became a huge viral smash. Coming out of nowhere, Newport Ymerodraeth State of Mind, which transformed the singer and rapper’s tribute to the Big Apple into a comedy celebration of a rather less glamorous town in South Wales, notched nearly 200,000 hits on YouTube within the first two days of being posted.

So a few weeks later MJ was asked to give a TED talk in London based around a question that has tested the mettle of so-called experts for a long while: ‘What makes a video go viral?’ “It was terrifying – I’ve never been so scared about anything,” she declares, with only a hint of exaggeration. Faced with the prospect of talking to an audience that expected some actual answers to that important question, she reflected that the phenomenal popularity of Newport had led her to a near-impossible situation. “What makes video goes viral? Nobody knows that. I’d be a billionaire [if I knew]…”

From humble beginnings

Morgan-Jane Delaney is quick to emphasise that she is very much a beginner at the directing game. True enough, she only picked up a camera and started making films about three or four years ago. She also argues self-deprecatingly that luck was a big factor in the success of Newport. That is possible too – but success is a habit she has already acquired in a manner that suggests this is a 25-year-old with considerable talent and a big future ahead of her.

For example, last November she won the best new director award at the British Arrows Craft Awards for an ad from her only commercial campaign so far. And one suspects that more awards will be forthcoming for her series of spots for the budget supermarket chain Aldi, which turn on its head the conventional wisdom that price comparison commercials are anathema to creative advertising. These short (20-second), simply mounted commercials use ordinary people as talking heads in one-take, locked-off shots, extolling the virtues of Aldi products as being ‘like brands, only cheaper’. The campaign – which began by using children and then moved on to adults and even pet animals – features witty, unconventional scripts by McCann Manchester creatives Dave Price and Neil Lancaster. But the use of non-professionals, filmed in their own homes, has proved to be the masterstroke, with Delaney’s direction of the inexperienced on-screen talent being crucial to the campaign’s success.

Everybody’s cup of tea

With over 30 Aldi ads completed, this highly popular campaign has produced some cult favourites – from the very first ad, Ketchup, where a tiny girl sits behind a well-known ketchup brand and an Aldi version, says she likes them both then whispers “but I don’t like boys”, to the elderly Scots gentleman who likes both brand and Aldi washing-up liquid (and really likes wearing rubber gloves), and the parrot who repeatedly screeches “Like!” at a range of Aldi wines. Most preeminently of all, there’s Tea - the ad where an elderly lady discusses two tea brands that her husband likes – PG Tips and Aldi’s cheaper version – before revealing her fondness for gin. That is the ad that won MJ Delaney her best new director Craft Award.

The campaign is still ongoing when shots meets her at her favourite Soho editing suite, and Delaney will soon embark on making some new Aldi ads. But that’s certainly not all she has been doing in the past year. Since Newport, she’s directed comedy virals for BBC Online and also a star-studded new version of Newport, featuring two dozen Welsh celebrities for the BBC-broadcast charity event Comic Relief. She is also just completing the edit on a short documentary for the children’s charity Plan; and is just starting the edit on a half-hour short film she has directed for Channel 4.

Charting the rise

It all adds up to a fairly meteoric rise for someone who was not involved in filmmaking at all until relatively recently. But advertising is in her family’s blood – she has three older brothers who are in the business of making ads, two work in agencies and one, Caspar, is a senior producer at RSA. But she looked set to join her fourth brother, the well-known journo and author Sam Delaney, in journalism when she joined Shortlist, London’s freesheet weekly men’s magazine, after graduating from Oxford in 2007 with a double first in English. She then gravitated to fashion journalism, and subsequently into styling as a freelance wardrobe assistant. She found herself working on sets for video shoots, for the burgeoning field of fashion films and promos – and caught the bug. “I think you have to try stuff to know what you don’t want to do, before you discover what you do want to do,” she reflects. “But from being on set, I thought: ‘I’d much rather be the director.’ So I started making films in my spare time.”

Her first opportunity to screen her films came when she and her friends put on their own art exhibition in London’s East End called Black America, turning the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall into an old disused bank with piles of scrunched-up (fake) money everywhere. “It was a bit mental,” she recalls. “For my part, I shot eight of my nephews and nieces as American icons, shooting some stuff in New York for the backgrounds.” That experimental piece, Deaf, Dumb & Blind, set to music by ANGRYDAN, got her noticed, and she joined Love for commercials. She also began to direct her own reportage-style fashion films for Dazed & Confused, filming backstage at some of London’s leading fashion shows, including a Vivienne Westwood Red Label show at Smithfield meat market.

The Westwood film, Backstage, in particular revealed a keen observational eye, and then in mid-2010 came Newport Ymerodraeth State of Mind – conceived by Delaney and her boyfriend Leo Sloley. “We really liked the song, and we started singing it with different place names, that’s how we came to Newport,” she explains. The opportunity to do a parody in the town then presented itself through family connections on her mother’s side. “My mum’s from Cardiff, and when I asked her what she knew about Newport she said that I have a lot of relatives from there.”

The roots of success

Delaney ended up exploring her Welsh roots, meeting a distantly related aunt, and being given a tour of the town. She and Sloley then learnt important facts by bombarding the relative and her kids with questions – including their favourite nightspots, and the locals’ predilection for curried chips – and wrote the pin-sharp script with the help of their friend, comedy performer and writer Tom Williams. “We wanted it to be accurate – but not too harsh,” says Delaney. “You don’t want to take the piss out of somewhere you’re not actually from.” And then they found their performers: another friend, Alex Warren, came on board in the Jay-Z part, and they did a casting to find Terema Wainwright for the Alicia Keys role.

What began as a name-swap joke ultimately works as a hilarious parody of the original song thanks to the quality of the writing – and a video that references the Empire State of Mind music video on a tiny fraction of the budget, via stills and a winning performance – and shot, of course, in Newport. But Delaney’s ambitions for the video were actually surprisingly limited. “I just wanted to get better at Final Cut Pro,” she insists. “The template comes from another video, and there are lots of stills. I realised it was a good way to get good at Final Cut.” To say that its success exceeded her expectations is a bit of an understatement.

“I don’t know how it happened, but within two days of putting it up it landed in front of people like Stephen Fry and Lily Allen who have a lot of Twitter followers,” she recalls. “It was pure chance really. I’m sure a lot of really great films don’t get seen. You get lucky sometimes – especially when it happens that quickly.”

Whether she’s being overly modest or disingenuous, Newport was a phenomenon, attracting considerable media coverage as well as millions of views – and then generating its own copycat online parodies. Lawyers for EMI, Jay-Z’s music publishers, demanded its removal from YouTube for infringement of copyright less than three weeks after being posted – and no ‘official’ version has appeared there ever since. But as Delaney says, “It changed everything.” And when it came to that TED talk a few months later, she could certainly reflect on the reasons for the success of Newport, and also on the difficulties for brands replicating that kind of momentum.

“When people send each other stuff on the internet it’s usually because they’re trying to brighten someone’s workday, and we made it light and affectionate, so it worked. Part of the joy of the internet is feeling like you’ve discovered something and passed it on, so branded virals have to try a lot harder. If you whack a big logo at the end of something people are less inclined to like it even if they’ve found it funny up to that point.”

Breaking new ground

With more online comedy work coming in after Newport, her break into advertising with Aldi came at the start of 2011. “I treated on it, then I met the creatives Dave and Neil, and they very kindly gave me this job, even though I’d never shot an ad before. They took a massive punt on me. But it seems to have gone alright.” It certainly has – for a campaign with very distinct challenges. The production of the Aldi ads, with their quick turnarounds, fairly low production values and use of non-professional performers, has little in common with most conventional commercial shoots. The production schedule is demanding, unusual, and requires someone with a distinct talent to deal with all sorts of people.

For a start, with the ads being shown in less prosperous parts of the UK and Ireland where Aldi stores are found, the people featured in the ads are also generally street-cast from those areas. From the initial casting tapes, potential on-screen talent is selected to appear in each ad, and Delaney and her small crew – generally just her producer, DP and sound person – will travel to each person’s home to film them.

Delaney’s skillsets, and probably also her youthful enthusiasm, have proven to be well suited to those challenges. “For every one that airs we’ll shoot either three or four adults, or up to six kids,” she explains. “The freshness they show in the casting often disappears when we shoot for real, so we always shoot more than we use. That means you may spend four days in Scotland going to 12 different houses, just driving around and meeting people – that’s a wicked experience.”

Also, because they are making product and price comparisons between bigger supermarket brands and Aldi’s, the brands are chosen quite close to the shoot, and consequently they have to make the ads one at a time. “One week we’ll be doing cereal, and then it’ll be washing up liquid. You can’t film them in a batch.” Now more than a year into the campaign, there is a tried and tested routine involving her and her small, closely-knit (and predominantly female) crew going on what she calls “Aldi duty” for a few weeks at a time.

It all started with Amelia – the ‘ketchup’ girl, and that remains one of her favourites of all the ads. But unsurprisingly her top favourite is Tea, the award-winning spot featuring her ‘gin’ lady, Jean. “Jean answered an ad in the paper having never done anything like it before – she said: ‘I would never have done it when my husband was alive’ – and she loved it. That’s one of the nicest things about doing this.”

Plan for the future

But it is also interesting to ponder, after some notable highlights in a relatively brief career, where Delaney is heading next. Having recently joined Moxie Pictures, she now has worldwide representation for commercials and is clearly making some decisive steps in both documentary and drama filmmaking. She has recently collaborated with young writer Tom Wells to tell a coming-of-age short comedy drama, Ben and Lump, as part of a Channel 4 new filmmakers scheme – now in post production.

With her just-completed film for the children’s charity Plan, she has transferred the warmth and humanity of her Aldi work into a very watchable and thought-provoking piece. For the film she travelled with her small all-female crew around London, Thailand and Mali interviewing 12-year-old girls, in what she says was a “totally incredible” adventure. “Twelve is kind of a crucial age for women – girls – internationally: things like early forced marriage, being pulled out of education, being made to work. But societies that educate their girls are the societies that do the best socio-economically. So if you change the life of a 12-year-old girl in a way you can change the world.” Her skill is bringing you these girls’ lives in a way that is revealing and serious – but also not too grim. “It’s supposed to be positive,” she adds. “We wanted to make a film that doesn’t press the child-in-distress buttons. For me its more powerful seeing them having fun and being twelve - but then hearing them saying things are happening that are not so good.”

Whatever happens, Delaney has definitely found her calling. “I’d hate to do any other job now. Sometimes I wonder why anyone does anything else, because it’s the most fun job in the world.”