Mark Zibert: The Zibert Effect

Though known for his epic, post-heavy sports shots, photographer-turned-director Mark Zibert is a sucker for capturing the magic in-camera. He achieves this through meticulous planning, preparation and clever tricks – for Nike’s Vapor Trail it was the sublime simplicity of a slanting set, for a 2012 Paralympics project he used tricky maths to figure out camera angles for a one-take film. Tim Cumming meets a master of movement with Boy Scout tendencies.

His 90s apprenticeship was in traditional film spliced with early Photoshop, and while his reputation is as a wizard of big-production, post-heavy, in-the-moment, sports-based shots and spots, Mark Zibert will go that extra mile to get as much of that wizardry in-camera, in the moment and on the spot, before the adventures in post begin.

“I recently shot a portrait of Margaret Atwood,” the Toronto-born, raised and based director tells me, talking from a multi-location shoot for Nike Russia, currently touching down in LA. “I hadn’t shot film in years and I was commissioned by Bullett magazine in New York to take a portrait, and thought it would be really cool to approach it differently. She wasn’t the kind of woman you’d want to photograph with a digital SLR and just snap away. That wouldn’t be the right approach, so I used a 4x5 camera, and brought ten pieces of film with me. I hadn’t shot with a camera like that since school, but I thought it would be a really cool way to take her portrait, because you really have to compose it. You can’t just look through your viewfinder and take a shot,” he laughs. “And it was a good way to work with her. I’m really happy with the results. I think she appreciated that approach too.”

Adjusting one’s horizons

Born in 1977, Zibert grew up in Toronto, the son of parents of Slovenian descent, and graduated from Sheridan College in Toronto in 1998. “In school we were shooting with 4x5 cameras, medium format. It was all film, but digital was starting to become a big part of it – we were scanning our negatives and touching up on Photoshop. I was pretty lucky to [be learning during] a time of great transition.”

He started his career as a photographer of high-end editorial and advertising campaigns. “A lot of it was riding on my abilities with post production,” he recalls, “and though there is always a lot of post in my work, I’m very much into the purity of getting as much in-camera as possible.” Take one of his most acclaimed projects – Nike Vapor Trail, made through W+K Portland/Tokyo and Imperial Woodpecker in the US, and starring Cristiano Ronaldo leaving a trail of carnage behind him as he powers towards the goal in his new Mercurial Vapor IX Nikes. It looks like a huge post job, but embedded in the heart of it is a very simple and very effective solution for getting the drama in-camera in the moment, not after the event.

“It’s a simple post job and it was very well shot in a studio, with green screen, and all the foreground elements were shot on these sets we built. We came up with a pretty cool way of creating the effect of all these players falling and flying through the air – what we did was build the set at an angle. We built this massive 25-degree pitch on a stage so all these people falling, tumbling and flying through the air are literally doing it. So we just corrected our camera horizon to the horizon that we’d created and got many of those effects practically. It was a really simple solution. There were still wire rigs and we were still shooting elements and stripping them in, but it was a pretty organic way of capturing the action.”

The key to orchestrating this kind of production is planning so tight it’s almost premonition. “I really like to focus on a lot of preparation and have it really buttoned down before we go. Being prepared that way leaves you more time to play around and find and discover things on the day. If you’re efficient and you have it planned out thoroughly, you can get that stuff captured early on and then allow time to experiment and play a little bit. Then you can finish your shoot with the confidence that you’ve got something to cut and there’s maybe something to discover when you’re cutting with all the extra stuff you grabbed.”

His transition from photographer to director came almost by chance on an Arrow Shirts print campaign commissioned by ad agency John St Toronto in 2005. “I was working with the creative director, Stephen Jurisic on it and when we were doing the post on the stills we had a conversation about trying to direct a spot, and he said, ‘why don’t we do some motion for this’.” So that’s what they did, with Dan Ford producing their Arrow Shirts spot.

For Zibert, the two disciplines of photographer and director are joined at the hip. “As a photographer, you’re directing the whole shoot and you’re the DP, too,” he says. “It’s just that the films aren’t moving.”

The emphasis on sport in his work stems from his childhood. “When I was growing up I was into skateboarding, so there was definitely some inspiration there,” he says. It was his teenaged skateboarding knowledge that helped win his first advertising job. “It was a national campaign for Nike in Canada, using athletes with injuries, and I think my insights into skating and BMX helped me, because I brought something to the table, even in terms of some of the copy, because it wasn’t accurate as far as the names of tricks go, so as I was having conversations with the agency, I was filling them in on what they should be called and that really got them stoked to work with me.”

Those long, hot Beijing summer days

The flashpoint where photography and action create magic is, of course, in capturing the key moment of play that evokes the full drama of athletic potential and prowess. While he claims he was always a pretty lousy skater, did that teenage obsession give him the edge where capturing the moment is concerned, by trying to do it for real? “For sure,” he agrees. “Just knowing that perfect moment and when to catch it – that’s something that develops as you learn. You learn how to anticipate that split second. As a photographer I have a bit of an understanding in general for sports, so I can communicate with the athletes and describe what we want them to do and work together that way, so it’s not just some random thing; we can choreograph a bit of a play together that makes sense.”

While he began making spots in 2005, it was his 2008 stills campaign for Beijing Olympics that really put him in the spotlight after winning a gold Lion – the first for China. “It definitely put me on the map globally, in the photography world, which was fantastic,” he agrees. “And it’s still one of my favourites. The layouts came out of TBWA Shanghai, and as soon as I saw them I was really excited. It became one of these bidding things, and I was committed to whatever it took to get that job, and I even offered to move to China, and work out of there locally for a few months.” Which is exactly what he did, setting up a post production studio in his hotel room while working out the logistics in a Beijing stadium at the height of summer.

“Again, I tried to get as much in-camera as possible. We spent four days shooting crowds, with 300 actors, and these poor extras had to just move around a field and we shot the backgrounds for practically every photograph so that we wouldn’t have to rely on cloning. It was brutal for us shooting it,” he adds, “so I can’t imagine what it was like for them... They were long, hot Beijing summer days, it was crazy.”

Into the blue – literally

Since then, he’s followed it with the likes of Vapor Trail and an astonishing film for the 2012 Paralympics, featuring a tableaux of accident and emergency situations, past which a Paralympian runner powers to the finishing line. “It was one take,” says Zibert, proudly, picking up on the use of tableaux as a storytelling device. “That inspired the Vapor Trail commercial too,” he says. “I grew up painting Dungeons & Dragons figures so I guess there was a bit of inspiration coming from those little model dioramas.”

Again, Zibert wanted to do it for real and in-camera, and in a single take. “We relied on post to paint out green screen, the stands and things like that, and we got it in eleven takes,” he says. “Thunderstorms were rolling in and out through the shoot,” he recalls, “and there was one window where the fog rolled in and the athlete had one more in him and we went for it, and that last one, number 11, was the one we ended up using.” Once again, Zibert’s intense preparation paid off. “There was a lot of math we had to figure out, because we wanted it to work as a one-shot, so we found our camera angles and calculated his distance and we had to determine how far you could pan your camera before it revealed the next set.”

Challenging, but for entirely different reasons, was this spring’s adidas It’s Blue, What Else Matters? campaign through The Corner London. Launching Chelsea’s new home shirt, it featured players including John Terry, Fernando Torres and Juan Mata submerging themselves in blue silicon paint.

“That was wild,” enthuses Zibert who acted as both director and DP on the project. “We created this special solution so the paint would stick to them and be opaque and blue but it wouldn’t stain.” The solution was so slippery and dangerous, they had to put crash mats everywhere, even when the players were just walking around. Then there was the time factor. “We had an hour with them, and it ended up being just half an hour, so I would be running around shooting stills then shooting some action. It was a crazy day but we got it all.”

The adidas experience also underlined for Zibert the difference between working with actors and celebrity talent. “With actors you have longer, you can tell them to do it a couple more times, whereas with John Terry, he’ll drop backwards into the vat of blue paint but he’ll only do it once, so you’d better get it.”

Alongside the big-production pieces, there have been smaller campaigns such as the short SportChek spots, Anthem, Let It Snow, and Your Better Starts Here, capturing game-changing moves and those moments that embody all the drama of anticipation, potential and promise in great sport.

Enter the Twin Dragons

And then there is Beef Thursdays, for Spike TV, a hilarious if guilty pleasure promoting an evening of “conflict resolution” that features unlikely figures from all walks of life launching into a fight at the drop of a hat – or a hat pin. “That was a fun spot,” he agrees. “That was a great collaboration with Jeff Kling out of Fallon – brilliant script, all these people fighting for ridiculous reasons.” Again, he used a simple in-camera technique to get that slightly jerky, lunging, authentic sensation of violence erupting in the most ordinary situations. “We really wanted it to feel like you’re in the thick of it,” he says, “and we shot it with an angled shutter to give it that stuttery effect. We wanted it to feel like an authentic moment instead of a choreographed, staged fight, so we really worked at the performances, and the talent [we had to work with] was incredible.”

Out of agency TAXI Canada Inc, he directed a striking spot for a Parkinson’s Disease charity titled Struggle, which featured a man fighting himself as a metaphor for the impact of Parkinson’s. He overcame its budget limitations by eschewing CG and scouring the casting books for identical twins. “I wanted a look that was handheld and documentary,” says Zibert, “and you can’t do that in CG. We couldn’t have that tension in our shooting style if we went digital, so we set out to find some twins who could fight.” Tall order. They searched fruitlessly for weeks, with Zibert ending up on Google, tapping in random phrases about twins fighting (“I came across some crazy things!”). He lucked out with the Toronto-based Twin Dragons, who had been actors in 80s Kung Fu movies. “We tracked them down and we got them in,” he says. “Having twins allowed us to set up two cameras, choreograph the fight, and just explore as they were fighting.”

It’s a brilliant and powerful dramatisation of the body revolting against itself, and like his big sports spots, it’s proof of the benefits – as every Boy Scout knows – of being prepared. “The more you can get in the camera, you more you can play on the day,” he says.

You can’t plan everything...

And the play is not going to stop any time soon. From shooting in LA, next he’ll be holed up in Prague, continuing work on the Nike Russia campaign, his first for that territory. “It’s very exciting,” he says, though it’s too early for him to discuss the project. As for the future, that’s one area where planning out every detail doesn’t quite work the way it does in-camera. “I have a couple of bids out on things,” he says, “but I don’t know what I’m doing next month.” He laughs, before sagely concluding: “I guess that’s the story of pretty well everyone in this business.”