Velvet's Zentner Translates Lush Looks to a New Visual Aesthetic
The German director, known for his visual effects and art direction prowess, is looking at narrative in a new way.
Velvet's Zentner Translates Lush Looks
to a New Visual Aesthetic
The German director, known for his visual effects and art
direction prowess, is looking at narrative in a new way.
By Anthony Vagnoni
If you try to describe the work of German director Matthias Zentner, lots of analogies spring to mind. It's often abstract and highly evocative. Frequently, the meaning of what you're seeing on the screen is open to interpretation, demanding that the viewer make his or her own associations with what the message is about.
It's lyrical, too, characterized by sweeping movements and gestures, by flights of fancy that have carefully choreographed characters and images leaping across the screen or swooping down from the sky.
It's often colorful and almost always densely layered, as though some mad set designer or art director was let loose in a visual effects playhouse.
SourceEcreative asked Zentner, founder of the Munich-based design and production company Velvet Mediendesign, to describe his approach, and the conversation was far-flung, humorous, introspective and often funny. "At Velvet we like to cook," he says with a grin, by which he not only means they like to mix disciplines, genres, crafts and techniques, but that they also play with flavors, textures and spices. "As a cook, you like to think about your ingredients, so we do a lot of experimentation, lots of testing. It can take time for the cooking process to work, as you add all the elements."
So if he's a cook, what does his kitchen turn out? Desserts? "Yes," he says, with a laugh. "Soufflés. We just try and give them a different taste each time."
Zentner should be well-versed when it comes to flavors, having sampled a regular smorgasbord of films and TVC for clients and agencies around the world. A genuine internationalist, he's shot for production companies and agencies throughout Europe, often bringing the jobs back to his Velvet kitchen where his team of post production and visual effects artists help him realize his distinctive vision for each storyboard.
He's also worked throughout Asia and the Middle East, and since earlier this year has been represented in the US by Harvest, the L.A.-based production company founded by Director Baker Smith and EP Bonnie Goldfarb.
Zentner was born in Munich and studied marketing, economics and engineering during his schoolboy days. His spare time, he says, was spent taking pictures and traveling. Rather then proceed into a career studying how economic trends worked in different markets, he struck out as a freelance writer and photographer for travel publications. He eventually ended up working at a TV station, where he began to edit promos.
That led to designing show openings, IDs and interstitials for broadcast TV channels in Germany, a background that's served his work as a director well. In the broadcast promotion field it's not uncommon for a writer/director to design and conceive a project and then handle all aspects of its production, from live action shooting down to editorial and visual effects - a model Zentner still embraces, both at Velvet and in his work with other production companies.
By 1994 he'd been promoted to the post of Head of Promotion and Design for the cable network Kabel 1. While there, he garnered a considerable amount of post production expertise on everything from compositing to visual effects supervision. In '95 he opened Velvet.
Zentner says that within a few years of opening the studio they were handling more and more international work. As its roots were firmly in broadcast promotion and motion graphics, their projects began to expand conceptually to include more visual elements. "In the broadcast design field, you have to direct your own stuff," Zentner says. "So in a sense, I was thrown into directing."
By 1999 Velvet was winning awards for broadcast design work at the German Art Directors Club competition, and naturally ad agencies began to call. One of Zentner's first directing assignments for a brand was a three minute film for the French cigarette Gauloises; it won a Bronze Lion in Cannes. Two years later, he made the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors List in Cannes. The floodgates had opened.
His US debut came in 2003, on a Haagen Dazs spot produced for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. Titled "Anthem," it was a remarkable departure for the brand, and for the agency, which until then was known most often for its work with humor. In the spot we see lush visuals of nature and landscapes, many of them colorized, accompanied by a quiet soundtrack and on-screen graphics that defined how the product is made.
From there Zentner started shooting for agencies like Merkley on brands such as Mercedes-Benz, working initially through Velvet but at times through a US-based company called foreign films. All the while, his work in Europe and other parts of the globe continued to grow. Most recently, he's been on a veritable world tour, shooting for the Dubai-based telecom company DU, Korean Airways, the Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla Group and Ballantine's scotch (in a TVC s running in Latin America and Mexico which shows off a much more narrative-driven focus than his more visual work). One of his most recent spots, "4711 Nouveau Cologne," is another ethereal spot, produced for Palladium Commercial Productions in Germany.
Many of these ads are classic Zentner - the spot for Aditya Birla, for example, is an often-abstract mix of unrelated yet visually dazzling vignettes strung together with a heroic musical score, many of which show European, Indian or Asian influences. For Korean Air's "For Life on a Whole New Scale," he has gigantic people cavorting in familiar landscapes such as New York City or amongst the pyramids. In the States, he shot an LG spot titled "Synchronized Washing" for Y&R/New York through Saville Productions that features fully dressed people diving through a hole in the ice to do synchronized swimming routines underwater as the voiceover talks about how the new LG washing machine boasts a revolutionary design.
The director is no stranger to sexiness; his Latin American spots for Fruit of the Loom, for example, are stylized displays of buff bodies and hot undies, while his Italian "Water Dress" spot the European mineral water brand Mattoni features a gorgeous blonde decked out in a dress that's just dripping off of her (as it should, since it's made out of nothing but acqua pura.
No longer limited to just TV commercials, Zentner has also branched out into a variety of other forms of design, including live events for Audi and a multi-media installation for the financial district in Dubai, the Gate. In addition, he's designed the branding for a low-cost airline in the Middle Easts, Jazeer Airways, and created the interior design for a restaurant in Dubai called The Edge
Zentner has also gone back to his days as a still photographer, shooting both the film portion and the print for some ad clients, as he's done for Korean Air, the mobile company DU, Nokia and the liqueur brand Licor 43. And, in a bold departure for most traditional commercial directors, he developed a ballet piece in cooperation with the Italian choreographer Gianluca Schiavoni for the European high-fashion footwear Tod's titled "An Italian Dream" that was staged at La Scala in Milan and directed accompanying short film of its performance. (You can screen a behind the scenes look at the making of this here.)
About his signing with Harvest, Zentner says he was attracted by their approach to storytelling, which is more performance and dialogue driven. "It's something I'm very interested in," he says, "as I'm looking to move my work into a new form of narrative, going just beyond just beauty or visual effects."
He believes that in today's jumbled media environment, these categories need more than just stunning visuals to register with audiences. "They need ideas," he says. "And that's not an easy thing to develop. But I love challenges, I like it when things are not easy to solve."
It will be interesting to see how things play out as he starts to collaborate with Harvest on pitches for scripts and projects, he observes. "They have strong ideas on how to approach things, as do I," he notes with a sense of anticipation. "I'm excited to see how we're going to work together. They have a very open-minded attitude."
Zentner's aware that his lavish visual style is not typical of the kind of work often seen on outlets like YouTube and Hulu these days; nor does it look like the documentary-style work that seems to be pervading the airways on TV networks in the US.
"Reality is an interesting concept," he says. "Lots of this work has been very successful, because it's cheaper and faster to produce. In a sense, audiences seem a bit fed up with the overwhelming visual clichés of advertising that they're used to seeing, much of which can feel as though it lacks some pureness of emotion." Zenter's evocative visuals can hardly be said to lack pureness of emotion, and what seems to please the director is that they're also so alluring to look at. Cleary, he says, there's still room for beauty and imagination in advertising, for the stylish visual environments he and his team so painstakingly craft at Velvet. "We still need these small worlds that we can believe in," he says with conviction.
As for reality, his take on it is to create what he calls "enhanced reality," and he cites as an influence none other than that master provocateur Salvador Dali. "What's real to some can be surreal to others," he says with a grin.
As styles change, and as Zentner figures out how his particular skills fit into the new visual vocabulary of advertising and branding, several goals become apparent. Most important, he says, is his desire to stay a generalist in his work. He cites the work of directors like Danny Kleinman, for example. "He does visual effects, but he also does comedy," Zentner notes. In the States, this can be a particular challenge: "Agencies there often don't think of you for certain kinds of assignments," he says.
If Zentner's work often reflects the style of Old World painters and fine artists, then it's no surprise that he's looking at times to escape from the nonstop drone of the modern world. "Everything happens so fast these days," he says, referring not just to the speed of media but of the process of producing work under a fast-forward microscope, in which clients want to be continually apprised of his progress. "It's changed the way I work," he admits.
These days, we're all fighting what he calls a wave of information that's "never ending," so incessant "it can make your head fall off." What does he do about it? "I look for the opposite," he states. "Those calm moments when no one is getting on your nerves, either late at night or early in the morning." For Zentner, this is a time for thinking, reflection and inspiration.
His objective, regardless of what he's working on or for whom, is more or less the same: "It's always about adding a little sparkle to the work," he says. "You have to give something back to the audience, something of beauty, something that lets them relax and breathe. I'm not a doctor, but I feel that what we do at Velvet should in some ways be healing. It should be able to take you out of yourself, if only for a moment."
Published 16 August, 2011
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