Director profile: Smith & Foulkes

It's a while since animating duo Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes spent long days glueing down and throwing up after inhaling toxins. They’ve got staff for that now. And a huge bunch of gongs for landmark work such as Honda’s Grrr – which for nine years was the world’s most awarded spot. They’ve also had Hollywood a-calling, but said no thanks, preferring, as they tell Tim Cumming, to stay in London working on new stories, characters and techniques and generally loving what they do.

Their name sounds like a deliciously old fashioned Saville Row tailor to the more landed gentry, but the fact that Smith & Foulkes are one of the UK’s most cutting-edge directorial duos in the world of animation is not news to their many blue-chip clients – the likes of Honda, Coca Cola, Intel, Motorola, Nat West and Panasonic. Incorporating CG, live action and graphics into their animation, they’ve bagged all the big prizes – Grand Prix and Gold at Cannes, Gold and Silver BTAAs, and D&AD black pencils among them.

We meet in Nexus – they’ve been with the Shoreditch-based animation powerhouse since it was founded by executive producers Chris O’Reilly and Charlotte Basvasso in 1997 – in the company’s basement conference room with its bespoke furniture and dazzling white walls. Smith & Foulkes are on a break from finishing a job for Honda’s Civic Tourer through Wiemens. It’s a live-action piece Adam Foulkes describes as “a car ad that has an animation aesthetic”. He adds: “We’ve worked with Wieden quite a few years, and they come to us when they’ve got a really strange script.”

“And then they let us run with it,” chips in Alan Smith. “They don’t say ‘this is what we want’,” he continues. “They say, ‘this is what we’re thinking, what do you want to do with it?’ They’re interested in how we’ll treat it, not necessarily how animators would do it but in taking someone comfortable with one thing and putting them into something else.”

“It can either be genius,” says Foulkes, “or go horribly wrong.”

Good acting with hands for Honda

Thankfully, last year’s Honda spot, Hands, erred towards genius. Its mix of animation, CG and live action is something of a Smith & Foulkes signature style, coupled with a smart visual wit and the kind of focus and attention to detail that great work demands. It’s essentially a roll-call of Honda products through the years, each one passing through the fingers, tilted this way and that, one morphing into another, with witty visual stories peppering the narrative to bring the objects alive.

“It was very important we didn’t have just a hand model do that,” explains Foulkes. “It was about being a good actor as well. He could think with his hands and bring something to it.” To complicate matters, they had to match the exact hand position at the end of every shot to the beginning of the next, and get every shot approved by the client and the agency as they went along. “So there was no going back.”

As Chris O’Reilly, who has been their EP since they joined Nexus, points out: “They don’t go into a project with preconceptions, but they’re very tenacious when it comes to finding and delivering the idea. They’re incredibly hard working, and very collaborative – which is easy to say, but harder to do.”

The duo met on the Royal College of Art’s animation course in 1996 and their first work after graduating was the visuals for U2’s 1997-98 PopMart tour. It was, says Smith, spreading his arms wide, “the biggest screen in history. The pixels were the size of a fist. We thought, oh brilliant, and then we saw our stuff.” He laughs. “Big screen, big mistakes.”

PopMart was also their first job at Nexus, following a stint at Speedy Films as jobbing animators – not a road they chose to pursue. “We’re not brilliant flowing 2D animators,” laughs Smith, “so we went off on our own, did a show reel, and said that we were available for hire.”

O’Reilly got in touch after seeing their work, saying he wanted to start a production company, and that Smith & Foulkes would be among his first signings. “They had a little space on Poland Street,” says Smith, “and we needed a place to work from.”

Soon, they were sharing rooms, and an ethos, too – animation for adults. “At that time,” remembers O’Reilly, “animation was a little bit synonymous with cartoons, especially in the UK, and we felt there were opportunities for more varied type of storytelling.”

“It was a learning period for the three of us,” says Foulkes, “learning how to go in and pitch a client for something that would be animated. Particularly then, when people would look at you, and ask, ‘animated? What do you mean animated, you mean just for kids?’ So it took a while. Our strike rate wasn’t high. It wasn’t an industry you could walk into and find loads of opportunities. That came over time, as more work came through.”

In-flight entertainment for NatWest

One of their first breakthrough spots was NatWest Escape, directed by Trevor Beattie for TBWA in 1999, for which they created animations based on airline emergency escape graphics. “And for a year after that,” says Smith, “people thought that was our illustrative style, but we only chose that design style because it fitted the idea of escaping.”

“They took a gamble on us,” says Foulkes of the NatWest job. “It was a traditional client with a traditional message, but they wanted to bring it out in a different way, and they took a punt on us.” At this point, they were still doing hands-on work themselves, something they admit they rarely do now.

“We have a skeleton crew of people and draw on a lot more talent,” says Smith. It’s much more about directing rather than doing everything yourself in small rooms.”

“These days, we spend 90 per cent of our time in meetings,” adds Foulkes, “talking to people and reviewing work. Before, I’d spend 90 per cent of my time gluing photocopies down.”

“Spraying toxic spray mount.”

“Bleaching things out then being violently sick because I’d been breathing it in for three days.” Foulkes grimaces. “Suffering for our art.”

Do they miss those days?

They both laugh. “Not really.”

“Moved on,” says Smith, crisply. “It’s interesting,” he adds, “people still ask, ‘did you do it all yourself’, and they can still get upset that you didn’t.”

From Amiga to avatars

Digital has changed everything, of course – during their time at the Royal College, there was but one computer in the whole building – an Amiga, for sound work. In terms of the power tools now at their disposal to create anything they can imagine, it’s an extraordinary leap.

 “In technical terms, it’s unrecognisable,” says Foulkes. “The industry now is so heavy on training, whereas that didn’t exist at the Royal College. You were there as a bit of a hobbyist. You’d be lucky if you got funding to make one of your little films – there wasn’t any expectation that you could go and direct in any kind of industry. But it maybe freed us up in terms of coming through in the era before technology. Since then, we’ve learnt the software we need to – we’re quite adept at After Effects. We learn the tech that we need.”

Through the 2000s, they built a reputation for hugely original visuals with a strong narrative seasoned with keen wit, and a heady cocktail of animation, live action, puppetry and CG in one combination or another. SuperBowl spot Coca Cola Avatar, for instance, featured internet avatars mingling with their live-action human counterparts on the streets of Buenos Aires, while Coca Cola Videogame meshed the safe family brand with edgy Grand Theft Auto-style visuals, and a story that harnessed the inherent menace of the game and turned it into a warm afterglow of a tale of street-smart redemption via an ice-cold Coke.

A major career breakthrough, 2004’s Grrr for Honda is officially the most awarded spot between 1999 and 2008 – two Black Pencils, two Cannes Lions, two Clios, and another 33 gongs worldwide. They must have quite a big shelf down there at Nexus. “And it brought us a lot more work,” grins Smith. “We did the titles for the Thunderbirds movie, and a thing for Lemony Snicket, for Dreamworks. So it was a game changer.”

He sees Honda Grrr as indicative of animation in the mid noughties. “You could still use it as a technique that hadn’t been seen before, whereas now that’s almost impossible. Everyone’s seen everything, all this amazing stuff, and you can’t wow people purely with animation anymore. You have to have a nice idea or a story.”

2009’s Intel Chase had both. “That spot almost sums up our entire working career!” exclaims Smith. “It was all packed in to this one thing.” It follows a woman protagonist with a buff envelope pursued from screen to screen to display the different software, and to move from program to program using the screen animations to frame the live-action narrative.

In the same year, they were also Oscar attendees, for This Way Up, nominated for Best Animation Short. The film follows the misfortunes of a pair of dour undertakers delivering a coffin through an extravagant series of mishaps. “At the Royal College, we’d done these rather impenetrable, purely visual films,” says Foulkes, “and we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could tell a story as well as put visuals on the screen.” Part-funded by Mike Judge, the man behind Beavis & Butthead, it scooped numerous festival awards and brought them to Hollywood for an eye-opening taste of how things are done over there.

“We’d wanted to make a feature for a while,” says Smith, “so it was really good seeing what was involved… and realising that we didn’t want to do it there.” Though they were offered a fully animated family movie, from one of the big studios, to develop it with a view to making it, “we saw the scripts and said no.” 

“Over here,” adds Foulkes, “you see it all happening over there, and think, what’s going on, how’s it made and why don’t we get involved? I think we saw why…”

Instead, they’re working on their own feature development with Nexus, trailing their first project with a children’s story for iPad. “It’s to introduce the characters to see for ourselves how they work as much as for any audience,” says Smith.

Detail, depth and general loveliness

At the same time as they finish off their latest Honda spot, they’re preparing a Coca Cola job that features animation with live action and puppetry. “And we’ve built a physical set,” says Foulkes.

“To see if the warmth and the charm of the real build works,” adds Smith. “We’re animating the characters in CG but we’re not trying to pretend they’re models. You’re not really meant to know one way or another.”

It’s these innovations in method and close attention to detail that attracts the clients and allows the duo to experiment. “There’s an amazing level of detail and depth in their work,” enthuses O’Reilly. “And they’re lovely to work with, and that makes a big difference in this world. They do this because they enjoy and that comes over in their work. Always wanting to push it and never sitting back.”