Everynone: The Everyday world of...

Take three twentysomethings, stir gently with the hidden moments of everyday life and simmer in a broth of found YouTube footage, and you too will find yourself transported, like Tim Cumming, to the world of filmmaking collective, Everynone, where the everyday is always extraordinary

Where do you draw the line between conceptual art, cinema verite, and a YouTube hit? Probably around the headquarters of young American collective Everynone. Recently relocated from New York to the Redwood forests of Marin County, north of San Francisco, the three twentysomething filmmakers who constitute Everynone – Daniel Mercadante, Will Hoffman and Julius Metoyer – met up while studying film at Emerson College in Boston, and started Everynone a year later, in 2008.

“We set it up as a way to get paid,” says Metoyer. “We knew we wanted to pursue creative endeavours together, and there’s a natural desire to formulate some kind of identity.” Like turning a good recipe into great food, all the right elements seemed to click between them in forging that group identity. “It’s very rare that you find your peers,” adds Mercadante. “It’s rare that you get into a situation where you become friends with people you respect.”

One for all and all for Everynone

“With us, we think, we talk, we hang out and come up with ideas we’re interested in and we want to make them,” adds Hoffman, who stresses the importance of the Three-Musketeer-like model for Everynone of ‘one for all and all for one’. “It seemed really stale and boring to say ‘directed by’ and have three directors,” he adds. “The word ‘director’ when we’re doing our projects is a strange word.”

Instead, they put their identity into the group – they all film, they all direct, they all edit, they all produce. And all that group activity is put into service of the core idea. Because ideas is what these three are about – the kind of ideas that can be spun out into visual, high concepts, and which also connect with everyone, like the first silent movies did, on an instinctive level.

“We share a set of standards,” says Hoffman, “though we don’t talk about it much because we don’t know how to talk about it. There’s a certain thing that we believe is cinematically truthful. We know when we capture a moment that we believe is true. There’s little discussion or room for debate or conflict or praise or celebration. It’s this strange neutral space of ‘that was perfect, now we move on to get the next thing’. It’s a driving force for us, and it’s weird to use a word like ‘neutral’, because we’re really excited when we see it. But we don’t delve into specifics. We want simple big things.”

“Everynone is the work itself,” adds Mercadante. “Films that appeal to everyone. That’s the big thing for us. It’s about observing and expressing something that everyone can find attractive and beautiful.”

“Some of our work is for the internet and that influences us,” says Hoffman, “but the driving force is the idea, the notion or concept we find ourselves believing in. It’s not exhibition-driven, at least not yet. We get excited by the idea, not by its outcome.”

Metoyer adds: “Anyone who wants to see it, can see it, however they want to see it. It’s not for anyone specific, it’s more for everyone.”

Hoffman outlines the Everynone creative process, beginning with the basic idea. “It comes from a thought or concept that we like or are driven by, and there’s a certain energy we can all feel when something clicks hard. As opposed to making decisions that are very subjective, we tend to find thought patterns that are more objective, at least in our circle. The idea will tell us what we can and cannot do. It’s puzzle work, problem solving, It’s creative, but it’s brainwork to come up with things that fit in this little box or stream or river we want to explore. We’ll list them, and a lot of our films begin as lists.”

Their to-do lists began with a series of short web films for Radiolab, a New York radio show melding science and philosophy, and syndicated widely enough to reach a podcast audience of some three million. Hoffman was an intern there, and quickly clicked with the team. “Our work with them from the start had this weird synchronicity,” he says. “They asked us to do a project and we had a project in mind that fit perfectly with the show.”

Both Everynone and Radiolab’s work stems from a single idea that’s perfectly, often poetically realised. Their first Radiolab film was Moments, a beautiful four-minute piece of visual choreography depicting split-second everyday moments – from breaking an egg to threading bait to fastening a bra strap – filmed with the uninvolved gaze of someone (or something) intimate but invisible.

“We wouldn’t be where we are today or as quickly if it wasn’t for Radiolab,” says Metoyer. “We did Moments with Radiolab, and they sent that film to their entire podcast. Our work connected with them very quickly and very fast.”

Their inspiration often stems from a single word whose simplicity conceals great complexity. “Words is a perfect example of that,” says Hoffman. “Radiolab was doing a show about words and we had this idea for a film about words. The positive and the negative, attracted to one another.” Then there is Symmetry, a split screen meditation on a concept that, according to Mercadante, “everyone thinks means something and to us means nothing, because it shows itself in everything”.

The fine art of found footage

Building a large and savvy online audience as they did with Radiolab was crucial. “The way the work took off on the internet really helped us find a true sense of confidence and belief in it as a valuable, meaningful and dignified venue for distributing content,” says Hoffman. “Coming from film school, it’s seen as a trash bin. The internet was there to find out about the film festival that was so fucking important.”

They have turned to the internet, too, for content – specifically from YouTube’s billions of clips. Using found footage, Words became re:Words, consisting wholly of YouTube clips painstakingly assembled by Mercadante.

“It’s that thing of trying to find simple, normal objective things that are beautiful,” he says, “And because they’re so normal and intimate, it is incredibly hard to capture and observe. What YouTube has created is a world of content that is captured honestly, and I got really drawn to building films from this beautiful content that was shot by anyone from a three-year- old with an iPhone to 90-year-olds with some Hi8 camera.”

He did the same with Laughs!, taking us from cradle to one foot in the grave with completely unselfconscious explosions of mirth from all over the planet. It led to an approach by Deutsch to remake it as an advert for VW, and the three of them, with Epoch Films, went off to London and Brazil for a month to shoot it, playing the role of comedians to get their footage.

It wasn’t their first ad – though on a recent shoot in Barcelona for a French McDonald’s spot, their youthfulness gave some the impression they were new to the game. “Maybe it’s because we are young and look young but we met people on that trip” says Metoyer, “who constantly thought we were just starting, that this was the first job we’d ever done. Like, no. We do this stuff a lot. We make films a lot and now we’ve made a bunch of ads.”

On the campaign trail

Their first campaign, made with Epoch Films, was for US retail company Target in 2010, by which time they were showing work at the Guggenheim, at myriad film festivals and even in high schools – the painful and moving Losers, a meditation on teenage angst, outsiderness and bullying – as well as via the Radiolab podcasts and Vimeo. They also worked with Droga5 on Day One, a series of five mini-documentaries for Prudential Insurance, interviewing baby-boomers on their first day of retirement, and more recently delivered a witty 30-second spot, The Everyday Race, for energy drink Powerade, which matched an excitable football commentary with a beautifully condensed, fast-forward evocation of young Londoners rushing to work in the morning.

Despite being warned that the working dynamics between client, agency and production company was “a twisted threesome that’s like a love affair and a war at the same time”, the reality for Everynone has been a lot easier. “We built ourselves as collaborators, so we are primed to share ideas and to say, ‘does this work?’” observes Mercadante. “The client has one purpose, the agency this purpose, and the director is looking for this purpose, and as long as you make sure everyone’s purpose is aligned – if we know why the client wants to make this – we’ll do everything we can to support that.”

What they don’t do is get involved in projects that don’t work for them. “If we feel like we’re not on the same page, there’s no reason to work together.” It’s an effective modus operandi and one that adapts itself for each project, led by a set of basic questions: “Are we the right people for the job, do we like this ad agency, do we like them as people, is this product worthwhile? And if we keep that aligned and open, we always have good fun.” Mercadante laughs. “I mean, it’s a great job, are you kidding me!?”

They’ve delivered around 15 ads over the past three years, and for Hoffman, “the work we’ve been doing aligns with when people are taking risks in the ad world. We’re lucky to be up there with the top calls when that does happen.”

They’re exploring other mediums, too, with a rhyming words project that grew out of the Words film currently in development as an app with digital agency Use All Five out of Venice Beach, California.

“We made this picture book,” says Mercadante, “where Julius took all these amazing photos of these simple little things that rhymed – a chick, a stick, a flick… Then we thought, ‘a picture book isn’t enough for us, it’s not new media enough’. It’s a limited audience of people who even buy books anymore. So we started working on it as an app.”

Perfecting the art of losing yourself

Getting lost in the concept, in the demands of a new process and how to execute it, is key to Everynone’s success and impact. “The struggle for anyone creating is that there’s a constant battle between experience and wisdom, and youth and naivety,” says Mercadante. “The more we make the more we start losing hold of that thing of just being lost, of letting the world tell us the story it wants to tell.” With Everynone, creativity is more about perception than feeling, and “tapping into these flows in the universe where you don’t have to do much, you just grab it and let it guide you”.

By exploring apps, and even breaking out of the screen altogether – “as soon as holographic tech comes out we’ll find a way to express the beauty of our human existence through that medium as well,” says Mercadante – Everynone remains intent on testing its comfort zone, to work in that space where they may not know anything about what they are doing, except that they will do it. “Our interests are all over the place,” agrees Hoffman, “and we have all these ideas in all sorts of things – long form, short form, apps, mugs, socks, lamps, interior spaces. Our interests are growing, and not in a way that’s outside of Everynone. They’re growing in a way that is Everynone.”

“The human condition is what propels us,” adds Mercadante. “This thing that is being a person, having consciousness. And the simple things that bind us – laughs, shapes, moments in our lives that seem valuable or invaluable but for some reason connect us every day – that’s what draws us to making stuff. That’s what inspires us.”