Joyrider's Wild Visual Ride

Joyrider's Wild Visual Ride
30 January 2009 

      

         
      Spencer Friend

There’s a piece on the Joyrider reel that neatly sums up what makes the company’s work special.  It’s a socially-charged music video for a little known band called The Phoenix Foundation titled “Hitchcock.”  Directed by Reuben Sutherland, it’s a stinging yet funny indictment of gas guzzlers, produced back in 2005, when the sales of thirsty SUVs was the rage not just in America but across Europe and Asia. 

The look of the video is grainy and somewhat monochromatic—it stars a fleet of boxy electric cars that set out to free us from petrol-burning beasts.  They’re real-enough looking, in an otherworldly way, but it’s not until about halfway through that you can tell they’re not real at all, but rather brilliantly realized CG images. 

“It’s an amazing piece of work,” says Spencer Friend, executive producer and founder of London production company Joyrider.  And what he likes most about it is that it deftly crosses that line—or more aptly, blurs it—between live action and animation, between what’s real and what’s in the director's imagination.  In this respect, it’s true to Friends’ vision for what Joyrider would be—a production house that seeks to make a name for itself by producing unusual, eye-catching work that crosses the live action-animation divide. 

This isn’t surprising, given that Friend worked on both sides of the business during a career that included stints with London animation house Passion Pictures as well as with English & Pockett, one of the top broadcast design and branding houses in the UK.  During this time he’s been the live action producer for an animation company and an animation producer working in live action, all the while dreaming of creating a shop that would be the perfect mix of both.

“What we wanted to do, actually, was to sit in the middle,” Friend says, “and offer both techniques in an unusual way, so that it didn’t feel as though we were coming at things from either a live action or an animation point of view. It’s really more balanced.”

To do this, he had to find a director corps that’s suitably multifaceted, and he seems to have succeeded.  The Joyrider roster is comprised of an eclectic group of talents, each of whom brings a fresh visual style to their work, regardless of genre or category.  It includes Sutherland, the directing collective known as AixSponza, Andras Ketzer, Adam Bizanski, Wade Shotter, Matt Westrup and Mike Mort.  What’s interesting about them is that all their work appears to be deft mixes of techniques and approaches, all revealing a personal stamp that Friend says is complemented by hands-on expertise in live action, 3D, character animation, VFX, stop frame, miniature set creation, design and more.

Recent projects from Joyrider include work for such brands as Orange, Playstation 3, BMW, T-Mobile, Eurostar, Huggies, Flora and Sun-Rype. Its directors do a mix of music video, branded content, web shorts, virals and commercials projects. 

“The stylistic landscape is constantly in flux,” Friend observes.  “As a result, we’re always endeavoring to pioneer new visual techniques that cross all kinds of boundaries.  We have a skill set in tackling VFX and live action challenges, and that allows us to provide a platform for innovation with our directors.”

His ultimate goal, he says, it to inspire his agency clients to see possibilities for themselves and their brands in the work his directors produce.  “We want people to look at our work and say, ‘That’s really amazing.’  It has to stand out, especially in this climate, but not in a weird or freaky way. Rather, it’s got to be stuff that’s not only fresh, but that people will watch and then wonder how it was done.”

Right now, Friend is feeling the effects of the general slowdown in volume that’s impacting production companies around the world, not just in the UK.  But he’s encouraged by the fact that Joyrider’s hybrid status as a company that’s part live action, part animation, will help them stay busy.  “We’re seeing scripts in which the agency is saying, ‘we want to make this, but our budget is really tight, tighter than usual.  Can you guys come up with a contribution that gives us what we want, but that comes in at our number?’ I think our ability to improvise and solve problems for agencies is going to pay off, and will provide us with lots of opportunities.  Last year was our best year ever, and I’m already hoping we can top that in 2009.”