CANADA: Tamir Moscovici

The supposed borderline ADHD of today’s tweeting, time-poor audiences doesn’t faze director Tamir Moscovici, whose long-form branded films effortlessly hold the attention of online viewers. He tells Tim Cumming about patronage and passion projects

When it comes to branded content, it’s the breadth of the fan base you’re drawing from and drawing in, that counts. This is where Canadian long-form branded filmmaker Tamir Moscovici has made his mark, an impression so deep that big-hitting clients like Audi, Honda, Porsche and Sony are prepared to give him carte blanche in terms of time and content to make long-form documentaries with hooks strong enough to reel in viewers by the millions. It’s a genre that’s counter-intuitive to advertising’s traditionally short attention span, which supposedly becomes even shorter with online viewing.

“You’re dealing with an enormous wave of white noise of content that you have to sift through,” agrees Moscovici. “And if I know what I’m watching in the first ten seconds, I don’t know if I’ll sit there for three minutes. But if it takes me two minutes to get what’s going on but it’s still engaging, then that works.”

 Dreadlocked dudes and coconuts

When we talk, he’s in Germany, prepping a more conventional spot that takes in an agreeable number of European locations. Also coming up is his first feature-length film, about Sony’s phenomenally successful racing game Gran Turismo, while behind him there’s the likes of Urban Outlaw, a 30-minute study of Magnus Walker, a dreadlocked dude originally from Sheffield who relocated to LA where he runs the Urban Outlaw clothing range and houses a huge fleet of Porsche 911s; a ten-minute, 16mm portrait of a young Tourette’s sufferer, Ethan, for Saatchi and Saatchi; and his 15-minute study of slot-car racing for Audi, Painting Coconuts.

With long form, Moscovici’s intent is “to marry commercial and technical shooting skills with high production values and real-people storytelling. The viewer gets that a brand has paid for it, but it’s told in an interesting way,” he says. “I partnered up with an editor, Paul Proulx and Marni Luftspring [now EP at Spy Films to which Moscovici is signed internationaly], who were like-minded, and we spent six or seven years chasing the idea that it’s OK to be blunt and say that this is paid for by Audi or PlayStation or whatever.” He compares it to patronage through history, from the Medicis to the sponsors behind the original ‘soap’ operas. “If you can give someone an interesting story that makes them go, ‘someone had to pay for it. It’s a cool story’, the side effect is that the brand looks cool by association.”

Though he was born in Israel, Moscovici grew up with his family in Toronto and at 17, took a course in experimental filmmaking at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He went on to study film at Concordia University, and earned himself an education in camera, editing, storytelling and the art of production across a range of shorts, music videos, documentaries and commercials. He was operating cameras as a focus puller in 2003 when the SARS epidemic hit and restrictions on travel crippled Toronto’s film industry. This motivated him to concentrate on his own creative endeavours. A music obsessive from a young age, he set up an electronica record label with a friend, put on major shows and tours and learnt to handle the logistics and planning involved – getting championed by the likes of Annie Mac and Pete Tong in the process, before it all went, well, a bit Pete Tong with the rise of Napster and free downloading. “So I went back into producing,” he laughs, “and ended up on the agency side. I had a strong technical, music and film background. Not just project management but as a creative partner. I worked for some great agencies, with good budgets and heavy-hitting directors. I studied where their successes were, what their failures were, and worked with talent and casting.” He describes the experience as a “great post-masters or PhD programme” and it equipped him to cast his own path in the world of long form.

 The urban gabbler

Take Urban Outlaw, which began as an idea for a five-minute web piece. Moscovici had read a magazine profile of Magnus Walker, got in touch and a month later was filming in LA with a ten-strong production crew. They shot for four days, “and Magnus didn’t stop talking so we ended up with this 30-minute film”. The concept was to “shoot cars a little differently”, and so it was a no-brainer when Porsche appropriated this ‘passion project’ and put it on its website. Moscovici cut a trailer, which picked up around two million views across various sites, while the full-length Urban Outlaw has racked up more than half a million, “which is a pretty strong return from a marketing standpoint. That proved to us that this works. It was successful, it was winning prizes and awards. It furthered the case study. And we applied that to Audi, and with Audi, it became really interesting. Now we had an agency that wanted a film, but they didn’t work in that medium. So they said, these are the key points we want to hit, go do it.” The result was Painting Coconuts, a 15-minute profile of David Beattie, the man behind Audi’s iPad-controlled, model car-racing track for Audi’s Quattro Experience, an interactive installation that put punters in control of 1:32 scale, Audi A4 Quattro slot cars. 

Give him enough rope

In the strange new world where brands back a film as patrons rather than clan chiefs, it gives director/producer Moscovici free reign creatively, while ensuring the brand’s presence during what can be a protracted courting process.

For the soon-to-be-completed Gran Turismo film, “it was a nine-month process going back and forth, bidding, quoting, writing treatments, proposals and all the rest. Then once that road map was there and we had our shopping list of names, they gave us carte blanche to do what we want – which is a very long rope to hang yourself with,” he laughs. “There’s a big fan base [70 million total units sold, 10 million for the last release Gran Turismo 5] so we have to check ourselves every step of the way to make sure we’re speaking to the fan base and to ourselves, to people who may not be gamers but who are interested in the story.”

Moscovici ran with the concept of not only talking to the core fans but also the plus-ones, “the ones who aren’t interested in the game but might be interested in the story”, says Moscovici. That story includes Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi, who’s been at the game’s helm for the past 20 years. “We want to tell different stories,” says Moscovici, “not just about the man behind the game, but the core team, and the GT Academy world, which uses a simulator to turn amateur drivers into racing car drivers. That’s a fascinating story – of the evolution of the game and of simulators and the democratisation of sport.”

At the other end of the scale, he chose a 16mm Bolex camera for his ten-minute character study of Ethan, a teenage skater with Tourette’s. Prepping meant meeting the family and spending time with Ethan, so that the shoot could be planned ahead, the level of trust and depth of story built, until it was ready to fly. “I don’t take the approach of just wandering and following for three months, and then going back to the edit room to cut a story together,” he says of his method. “I try to get to the essence of the subject and whittle it down to scenes that I’m going to film, and in those scenes I try and get to some kind of truth.”

With Ethan he also used the properties – and limitations – of the camera and film itself to help tell the story: “Letting it be exposed to daylight, burning the film, juddering frames to reflect the state of Tourette’s, the tics, to connect in some way to the synapses firing or misfiring. It was an opportunity to do stuff to it that you would never be told to do and that was the moment of epiphany, thinking, if film is a different brush in our toolbox, we can use it in a way that nothing else can replicate.”

You can’t always get what you want

While perfectly at home with the conventional 60-second spot – “the good thing about commercial work is that the variety keeps it interesting and you get to explore and try different things” – Moscovici’s passion is firmly planted in the longer form. “It’s exciting and interesting and breaking new ground. And people like Werner Herzog are doing it, too” – he cites Herzog’s recent AT&T film about texting while driving. “Clients know what they want, but it’s our responsibility with this new genre to not necessarily give them what they want but what they need. We have to keep pushing the boundaries.”