Advertising's Song and Dance Man

Partizanulls Michael Gracey Turns Music and Motion 
into a Movement

By Anthony Vagnoni

Can’t get Rob Marshall to shoot your spot?  And George M. Cohan is unavailable? Relax. There’s always Michael Gracey.

This Australian director, who trained as an animator and often does his own visual effects work (aided and abetted by a regular team of visual collaborators), has become the go-to guy for song and dance TV commercials and music videos.  And he’s managed, thanks to two very high profile jobs for Saatchi's in London and T-Mobile, to develop a reputation as the director to turn to when you need to pull off big, public, spontaneous eruptions of movement, energy, music and emotion. 

In the process, he’s won himself a Grand Clio in the directing category for his T-Mobile “Dance” spot and drawn headlines around the world with his T-Mobile “Sing a Long” spot.  Both are part of the brand’s “Life is for Sharing” campaign, created by Stephen Howell and Rick Dodd at Saatchi and produced by Ed Sayer.

How does he feel about all this?

“It’s fantastic,” says Gracey, who’s signed with Partizan.  “As a director, you’re always thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could get these kinds of spots?’ And it takes a lot of faith on the part of an agency to let a director handle these big projects—that’s why they like to give them to directors who’ve done them before.”  And that list now includes him.

Gracey’s work—much of it produced in collaboration with the production designer and fellow visual effects specialist Pete Commins—includes music videos such as “Your Game” for singer Will Young, “Call My Name” for the vixen Charlotte Church and Alesha Dixon’s “The Boy Does Nothing.”  All are song and dance extravaganzas, with the “Your Game” video being an astonishing mix of theatrics, dancing, effects and animation so deftly pulled off you’ll scratch your head as to how it was done.

In addition to Commins, Gracey’s group of regular collaborators includes an editor who goes by the single-word name of  Diesel.  Together they make up a group that goes by the name Babyfoot.  “It’s really just a collection of us that come together to work on any number of projects from concept art to feature films,” Gracey explains.  “Pete is the world’s greatest concept artist, illustrator, and production wizard, and his mind is just well beyond mine. He’s intimately involved in the initial concept work on everything we do.”

Gracey points out that all of the Babyfooters have backgrounds in animation and visual effects.  “Because we cross all these disciplines and techniques, we get this wonderful mix of aesthetics and styles,” he says. 

The mix can be seen in much of Gracey’s commercial work, including spots for Fiat, Ask.com, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer.  Typically, Gracey’s ability to handle choreography, as well as his penchant for seamless integration of visual effects and animation, is near the forefront.  For example, his McCain “Chips, Glorious Chips” spot for London agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay is a homage to the great studio musicals of Hollywood’s golden days, in which the camera tracks along as singers and dancers move seamlessly—and apparently all in one take—from one elaborate set to another as they belt out a jingle sung to the tune of “Food, Glorious Food” from the “Oliver!” soundtrack.

The team is currently working on a Broadway musical, its first, titled “Fast Love.”  Gracey describes it as having a similar structure to “A Chorus Line,” but instead of being built around dancers auditioning for a show, it’s based on the rapid-fire rejection mill known as speed dating.  He’s collaborating with writer Craig Pearce, who co-wrote the screenplay to "Moulin Rouge" with Baz Lurhmann and wrote the screenplay for Lurhman’s break out hit “Strictly Ballroom,” and with musician and producer Josh Abrahams, who produced the "Moulin Rouge" soundtrack.  They expect “Fast Love” to open in New York next year.

Gracey’s best known work arguably is the T-Mobile “Dance” spot.  It was inspired not just by the flash mob phenomenon, but also by a quite obscure influence: director Terry Gilliam’s largely forgotten 1991 “The Fisher King.”  In the film, Robin Williams plays a deranged homeless man.  In one scene, as he follows someone through Grand Central Station in New York, everyone around him suddenly starts to waltz.

“The concept for ‘Dance’ was that every 10 seconds a dance routine would change, and the music would go back ten years in time, so the choreography would change as well,” Gracey explains.  “I showed the agency an example of it, and you could totally read it.” 

What most impressed him about the project was that the creative team instinctively understood how powerful this approach could be:  “Their genius about this was twofold: One is they understand that anything that happens that’s out of the ordinary results in people pulling out their phones. That just seems to be the culture we now exist in.” Gracey notes that even during rehearsals, which took place in an empty train station in London in the middle of the night, maintenance workers were capturing the action on their mobile phones. "The other thing they were on to was the fact that the real magic in this spot exists in our ability to get people to join in—those would be the shots that made this memorable,” he adds.  To achieve this, the production team filled the station with dancers who were obviously part of the flash mob, but also with other dancers who appeared to just be passers-by and who immediately jumped into the action, helping coax others along with them.  “We had to get the general public involved to make it work.”

The spot was shot, cut, posted on the web and run on air in a day—a necessity, Gracey notes, when pulling off an event like this in a public space that’s being documented by hundreds of people with video-enabled phones.  More valuable to him, however, was how it came off: “It doesn’t matter how much people are smiling when we were doing this.  You can tell whether there’s a great amount of joy and happiness while you’re filming, or if it’s a total nightmare.  You can see it in people’s eyes.  And to be honest, standing there on set and seeing that many people spontaneously dance—and the general public just going with it and shooting and calling out—you knew by the sheer nature of the moment that it was going to be something special. “

T-Mobile’s “Sing a Long” was a very different idea, Gracey says.  The spot features thousands of people—thirteen and a half, according to the director—meeting in London to sing along to pop songs, lead at times by the singer Pink.  The spot features frequent shots of people singing along to the words on a giant screen, wireless microphones in their hands.

“The advantage with ‘Dance’ was that no one knew what we were doing,” Gracey says.  “There were lots of natural reactions.  Here, everyone showed up knowing that we were making a commercial.   So it did lack that sense of surprise and spontaneity.”

On the flip side, Gracey notes that the event brought people together in a fundamentally different way.  “The overall theme of the T-Mobile campaign is about sharing, and on this spot, every single person had their phone out and were either recording what they were participating in or calling someone to tell them what they were doing.”  The result was, at times, magical—“having that many people singing an a capella version of ‘Hey Jude’ was tremendous.”

As with “Dance,” “Sing a Long” reveals what Gracey says is the ability of advertising ideas to extend beyond the media buy.  “If you can create an event, it will get noticed around the world,” he explains.  “We brought London to a standstill while people put their arms around each other and sang a Beatles song.  Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of calls from people who have ideas that have been inspired by this. And it’s really just been fantastic.”