BONAPARTE signs director Mackenzie Sheppard

Question: what do a travel show for aliens, Japan’s first female rugby squad and a man trapped in his own mobile phone have in common? Answer: Mackenzie Sheppard. 

The Tokyo-based director, who recently signed to Berlin-based production company BONAPARTE, has built a reel that’s notable for its sheer variety and visually diverse style. A hands-on director, deftly mixing filmic techniques from live action to VFX, 360 and animation and adding a dollop of magical whimsy, his award-winning work spans everything from original content series (SiGNALS; Visit Earth), to short films (Man in Phone, Donny the Drone), commercials for household names like Nike and IKEA, and the award-winning Liberty Fields docu-short for Guinness.   

Trying to define Sheppard’s aesthetic is nigh-on impossible, as he himself admits: “I remember being told early on by somebody: “I don’t know what your style is, man” and being simultaneously annoyed but also challenged to understand what ‘style’ or ‘vision’ really is. All I can say is taste/style/aesthetic grows in time and I’ve drawn from a lot of different interests in my life to develop that.” 

Though his style may be esoteric, one constant in Sheppard’s work is his magical take on storytelling and gift for weaving whimsical worlds, in which inanimate objects frequently spring to life. Single-use plastic bottles bare their souls in support groups, dumplings (and other dough-based culinary delights) sing, and a sentient drone accepts Time magazine’s Person of the Year award. “I’ve always enjoyed escaping in my own stories,” he explains. “It all started with drawings, and then I moved into a Lego phase that basically lasted until I was…uh…21.”  

A Canadian national, Sheppard was born in the UK but moved to Japan aged five. Navigating these two very different cultures has given him a unique perspective as a filmmaker, and yet, he points out, “the main thing I’ve learned is how universal storytelling is across any culture. I often find myself balancing three things: what I want to say, what the audience will understand, and then in commercials what is required to be said. This sort of trinity of culture meets creativity is what I am always trying to navigate.”  

As a self-taught talent, Sheppard admits to loving “every element of filmmaking” from shooting to making music, but particularly enjoys the freedom of editing. “Before I knew how to direct something, shoot, write something, I knew how to splice a clip and make it mean something.” Having started out in music promos, he broke through with the Young Director Award for short film Man in Phone, a Kafkaesque fable in which a tech addict wakes up trapped inside his own mobile. The dark side of technology, along with the destruction of the natural world, is a recurring motif across much of Sheppard’s work: in Donny the Drone, the film’s eponymous hero reveals a sinister world domination agenda to save the planet, while YouTube Originals series SiGNALS humorously spotlights the environmental cost of single-use plastics.