Was quite an honor to sit down NFMLA Board Chair Danny De Lillo (Twitter/Instagram: @dannydelillo) to talk about my award winning short “All The Pretty Things”, which was covered today by Moviemaker Magazine.

The film is quite special to me. A bit of an experiment to blend the two worlds I straddle daily: Advertising and Filmmaking. I wanted to see if it was possible to bring multiple brands into a film and create a narrative around them that was entertaining and didn’t feel like a commercial.

It’s a silent film, or, a music video if you like (with an amazing track by the legendary Flavian Berger) and was done so on purpose since I wanted to use the language of product (and product doesn’t speak). The actors aren’t even actors; they are leaders in their respective fields, some hotel executives, others, dancers, others photographers. I wanted to use real people using real product and see what kind of a world it would produce. A pretty one I think…. here’s the trailer:

For the style and attitude I imagined if Los Angeles was a person and had an Instagram feed. I wanted it to be fun, vibrant, and glossy like we all want to think LA is. In reality, Instagram is really just advertisements for people and their lifestyles, your selling an idea of what you want your life to look like to others. In this way it works into the concept of a commercial acting like a film.

In the end the piece was quite successful for me. Besides winning over a dozen festivals at this point, the conversations started by it are amazing. What I love most is that it is reaching such a wide range of people who are drawn in by so many different aspects of the film. Maybe they are interested in the custom suits, maybe the couture glassware, maybe the quarter of a million dollar motorcycle. Once they jump into this world however, everything else becomes their favorite pretty little thing. That’s fun, and proves that you can advertise without even saying a word.

Here is the entire short, enjoy.