Face to Face with… Erwin van den Ijssel

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A product of PostPanic Amsterdam's talent scouting scheme, PanicProgram, young director Erwin van den Ijssel recently completed three fun idents for channel Disney XD's summer programming schedule.

Aimed at Dutch children, the videos stimulate the imagination and feature sets built by Ijssel's team, which had them reminiscing on their own childhoods. Here, the Dutch director talks about making a mess with props on set with his chain reaction scenarios, creating good content for kids, and how he even got to 'barbecue' the client on the job.

What appealed to you about the job?

Well, first of all, from the moment I read the brief I felt like a 10 year old again. The whole project just felt like playing around and making a mess without [the chance of] my mum coming in to make me clean up. I also liked that the brief was quite open. Disney XD wanted to have chain reactions, but from the beginning they were really open to doing this in a different way from what people might have seen before, so that was really interesting to me. Since humour was such an essential element for them, I thought it would be nice to take the principle of a chain reaction, but use it to tell funny stories, with each element of the story triggered by the chain reaction.

Where did filming take place?

We filmed for three days in a studio in Amsterdam – since we had four sets and they all had to be prepared at the location itself, it was quite a big studio. And as you can imagine, we made quite a mess of it, with all the ice cream, confetti, sand, and 'hagelslag' (typical Dutch chocolate sprinkles) being thrown around.

How long and how many people did it take to prepare the props and build the set?

Two people worked for about three weeks on preparing all the props. As you can imagine, most of the mechanisms required a lot of trial and error to get them to actually work. It was so great to see everything come together; as I was developing the scripts I had some ideas of how we could make the objects work, but for a lot of them I had no idea how to actually make it happen. So it was really exciting to see what techniques they came up with, and besides that they even came up with a lot of great new ideas, up until the shoot itself actually.

What happened to the props after the shoot?

We divided them up nicely – the art department has some, Disney has some and we have some. And then, of course, all of the kids in the idents got their own cardboard cut-out, which they were really excited about. A funny story about the characters by the way is that all the grown-ups we see throughout the video are Disney XD's entire on-air team. Probably the first and last project where I got to put the client on a barbecue!

What’s your favourite ident from the three and why?

Hmm, I'm gonna have to say Camping, because it was the first one I saw with music and it really made me chuckle – plus that bird is so beautiful. But it's nice to hear that everyone in the office has their own favourite.

How hard is it to create engaging content for kids?

Well, it was my first time creating content for kids, so I really wondered what they would think of it. I think the most important thing I tried to keep in mind was not to underestimate them. Disney XD is aimed at 8-12 year old boys and although they're really young, they've also seen a lot, and the last thing they want is to see something too childish. So in doing the art direction, we really had to find the right line, but I think it worked out well in the end.

What was your favourite toy when you were a kid and did you used to make a mess for your parents?

Well I was drawing most of the time so that never really resulted in a big mess – although I remember going through a pretty hardcore fusible beads phase, which ended up with the whole living room floor covered in them on more than one occasion. I’m pretty sure that when my mum sees these idents, though, she'll be happy as it could’ve been a lot worse.

Tell us about adding the Dutch element? Did that bring the project closer to your hearts?

The Dutch element was really important to Disney XD and it was nice because there were some elements that I immediately thought had to be put in because they were really Dutch (the 'hagelslag', for example), but then also some of the international people in our office came up with some stuff which I never realised was typically Dutch, such as the 'chips box' used as a football goal. But it was funny to see how we could make these idents really Dutch – with the camping one, for example, I knew straight away that there had to be rain, and loads of it – there's just no other way of camping around here.

And what was the reaction from the first children you showed the work to?

The first children who saw it were the ones whose images we used in the idents. And they were really excited, but then again they got to be on TV. I've since shown a couple of other children the idents and they seem to really like them, too. What I really hope is that it makes them want to create stuff like this as well... I’m not sure if parents will agree but for me it really is 'do try this at home'.

Anything else you’d like to add?

My favourite part of the shoot was when we were doing the Sports ident, where the skater girl nears the ramp. The ramp was supposed to flip over so she would bump against it, but instead it launched her into the air. It looked so funny that we just decided to go with it and change the story. I really liked that because it felt so much like a true chain reaction should be – you build it, and then you expect it to do one thing but maybe it does something completely different. And that's the whole beauty of it.