On My Radar: The Perlorian Brothers

What the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen recently?

MG: In these crazy days we admire the thinking that our friends at Rethink have done for Kraft Peanut Butter. They helped convince Kraft to donate their media to small businesses who really needed help and support at this time. Cool, bold, generous, appropriate. We were also excited by this amazing piece of live work that Spike Jonze did for Karen O on the Colbert show: (videos are just ads for people, right?). But the most exciting advertising we’ve stumbled on lately is this...

What website(s) do you use most regularly?

Film Grab, because sometimes there’s no time to watch the whole movie to find the reference image you want.

Booooooom always has something interesting and unexpected. They’re a great resource for visual arts of all kinds.

Weekly World News [below]; “The world’s only reliable news”. Google Books Project has archived every issue of this journal back to 1981. 

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought? 

IL: That would be our Griswold No.18 Heart/Star Cast Iron waffle press, which makes five perfect, heart-shaped waffles, and one star shaped waffle in the middle.  It’s made for a 1920s farmhouse cookstove, so it works best on the barbecue. And why?  Because heart-shaped waffles.

What product could you not live without?

IL: A Uni-ball Signo 207 0.7mm pen (black ink) which has the perfect stroke for scribbling rough storyboards on the fly, and quick-drying ink so left-handers aren’t smudging the shots.

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year?

MG: Well, of course, Parasite is amazing, but everyone knows that. But I just rewatched The Phantom Thread the other night and the amount of pleasure that is brought me was not insignificant.

What film do you think everyone should have seen? 

IL: Anything by our home-grown prairie auteur Guy Maddin. His style is so hand-crafted you can really feel the 'making' of filmmaking in what he does. They’re thoughtful, strange but familiar, completely removed from time and place, and really very funny. Where to start? His masterpiece Tales from the Gimli Hospital [below], or the dream-state documentary My Winnipeg, because it’s the story of where I’m from. 

MG: Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (you can watch the whole thing here).

What’s your preferred social media platform?

Lately it’s been Instagram for its single-minded, visual-based simplicity.

What’s your favourite TV show?

IL: Saturday, September 13th, 1986; a couple of weeks into my first year of art school, I set my alarm clock so I wouldn’t miss the much anticipated debut of Pee-wee Herman’s new Saturday morning kids show on CBS (though truthfully, the anticipation alone was enough to wake me). It didn’t disappoint. Scored by Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman and DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, set in a world designed by artist Wayne White, Gary Panter and Ric Heitzman. It was the essence of 80s avant-garde, distilled into a crazy kids show. As Wayne White described it: “Pee-wee’s Playhouse was an art project that happened to get on TV.”

What’s your favourite podcast? 

Our good friend and wardrobe stylist Keith Wager has a new podcast called It’s All Bad. Keith is the best storyteller we know. He will start telling us some kind of outrageous story from his wild and wooly pre-film-industry-life on set, get interrupted by the fact we need to roll camera, and then hours later pick up that story, mid-sentence, exactly where he left off, without missing a beat. And he has some crazy stories. And some crazy friends, who are all part of the podcast. They sum their show up as: Bad decisions. Good stories (not for family together-time quarantine listening, headphones recommended).

What show/exhibition has most inspired you recently?

MG: Matthew Wong at Karma Gallery NYC. I saw this show of large and small paintings last December; a dreamy, poetic, heartbreaking final show from a brilliant painter. Read about it here and look for his paintings online to get a sense of what he was all about. And hope that you can catch them in person someday. Genius.

What’s the most significant change you’ve witnessed in the industry since you started working in it?

This is a huge generalization, and one that has many notable exceptions, but as far as creative advertising, the past dozen years (since the last recession) has seen advertising’s centre of gravity shift from being an idea-focused endeavour to being a client-focused one. The first thing creatives used to tell us was what they are thinking about their concept. Increasingly, however, what creatives seem to concern themselves with is what the client thinks about their concept and what the client expectations are.  

Breakthroughs don’t often happen when the mindset is to satisfy a predetermined client expectation. 

And certainly, client opinions and concerns are, and always have been, of great importance, but a creative agency is hired to innovate and surprise, not just to take orders. Client input should be a starting point, leading through strategy to unexpected places. Breakthroughs don’t often happen when the mindset is to satisfy a predetermined client expectation. The logical conclusion to this kind of “do what we’re told” approach is a client saying, one day: “what am I paying you guys for?”  And that is already happening all over. Agencies need to rediscover what their purpose is or risk losing it.

If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be? 

Tastier snack plates at pre-production meetings.

Who or what has most influenced your career? 

SCTV: the Canadian sketch com series [below]. If Monty Python is jellied eels, and Saturday Night Live is a greasy hamburger, SCTV is an overflowing bowl of maple syrup.  Watching SCTV, and later the even more absurdist and rule-breaking Kids in the Hall, was formative comedy for our developing brains.