Jesse Dylan Shapes Social Cause Work via FreeForm

Jesse Dylan Shapes His Social Cause Work via FreeForm

Eclectic FORM director uses new collaborative group to
apply additional focus on causes, charities and social movements.

By Anthony Vagnoni

The work of FORM partner and director Jesse Dylan runs the gamut from TV spots to music videos to feature films.  What ties all this work together is that it’s purely commercial in nature—whether its entertainment, advertising or music promotion, it’s always produced in support of a product, a script, a studio, a record label or an artist.

There’s another side of his work that has a more purpose-driven role—it’s a collection of films he’s made, along with Executive Producer Priscilla Cohen, for non-profits, social programs, companies, charities and NGOs.  All of this work, the director says, is motivated by a different goal: to help people, groups, institutions or popular movements better tell their stories, and hopefully influence others at the same time.

Dylan has now grouped all this work together under a new banner—FreeForm. It’s designed not merely as a way to offer Dylan’s work on a pro bono basis, but to allow him and his FreeForm colleagues of directors, artists, writers, photographers, planners and strategists to produce multimedia projects that promote people, products and ideas that make a difference.

As the FreeFormweb site explains, “Our clients are the change agents across industry, society and culture.  They’re helping to make the world a better place through new ideas and innovations.  We help focus and find a voice for their ideas through film, design and new media.”  

Dylan has done socially conscious work for years, but says that now with FreeForm he’s developed a means to put it all in one place.  “Because I work on so many different kinds of things it’s just a challenge for people to understand what I do,” he says.  “It’s not really about me as a director, but rather about finding a place where you can work on these things and help the people you’re working for solve their problems.”

His prominence as the director of recording artist will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video (among other projects), has cemented his status as a socially-conscious filmmaker to be reckoned with.  The short film, produced by FORM for the front man of the Black Eyed Peas, swept across the Internet in the months before Barack Obama’s election last year. It’s been recognized with everything from an Emmy to a Webby, and landed the pop star on CNN on Election Night to talk about the significance of Obama’s victory.

Dylan seems to be doing more and more of this kind of influential work—hence the need for an infrastructure to give it more shape.  His recent projects that fit the FreeForm profile include working with the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN); producing a video for (RED)Wire, Bono’s digital music service; directing a riveting documentary for Desmond Tutu and The Reconciliation Forum, a global movement calling for mass understanding and the eradication of hate-inspired crimes; producing a short film for Creative Commons, a nonprofit rights and licensing group designed to foster collaboration by making it easier for creative people to share work in an online environment; creating content for the TED Conference; and shooting a series of public service ads for the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF).  He also directed a documentary with Cameron Diaz in which the star, an avowed eco-activist, talks to experts about a wide range of issues related to sustainability and the environment, and is currently working on a project for former President Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative.

The director's touch with the TV commercial format--recent spots include work for Nintendo, Gatorade and Nike--is readily apparent in his FreeForm projects. His series of celebrity-driven PSAs for the EIF, for example, reinforce the importance of volunteerism and supporting such organizations as Welcome Back Veterans, which is a Major League Baseball charity  supported by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, wife of the Vice President. The ads are perfectly balanced blends of information, persuasion and promotion, indistinguishable from the best real people ads out there, except that some of its people are major stars: Gwyneth Paltrow, Matthew McConaughey and Blythe Danner are among the performers featured in the PSA. This new campaign was unveiled at an event held in New York on the day before the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack.

Not every project that FreeForm takes on is pro bono, Dylan adds, but he’s quick to note that whether or not this work has any budget behind it is beside the point. “What I like about this is that I get to work with Harvard on the lack of medical innovation in education, or with Creative Commons, or with Bono’s online music magazine, or with the One project on global poverty. Being able to work on so many of these different and compelling issues is what interests me.”

The objective for FreeForm is to help these organizations better express their mission, their issues and themselves, he says.  "Usually we're working with organizations that need a little help in making clear what they're all about. We try and help them express what their DNA is all about in a way that inspires people, which in turn allows them to get involved and do good things."

Does he see this effort having an impact on his work in advertising?  In a roundabout way, the answer is yes.  “Before you can make an ad, as a company you have to know who and what you are,” Dylan explains.  “In advertising, basically you’re trying to present an idea to a single per-son—it’s about building a relationship. You really have to do that before you can make messages that resonate with people.”  Similarly, the efforts of Free Form will be to engage, educate and inspire people on behalf of a range of causes, efforts and ideas, and to increasingly do that in a manner that doesn’t rely on traditional broadcast media to do so.

And, as Dylan notes, this approach might not be for everyone.  “You really have to want to ex-plain yourself to people, and not everyone wants to do that,” he suggests.  “At FreeForm, we’re obviously interested in working on things that are socially conscious.  And that can easily mean that we’ll be working for corporations, helping them better explain their corporate social responsibility efforts.  I think that’s an area where we can make a big contribution.  If a company wants to do good things, then what we can do is help them build up the story around that.”

Published Nov. 3, 2009