July 20, 2025

Only press REC when it matters

I watched The Boy and The Suit of Lights at Edinburgh’s recently reopened Filmhouse. Screen 1 was pleasingly full for a documentary screening given that it was a gorgeous, barmy Saturday evening; a rarity in this town. The film was shot over five years and it’s a nuanced coming of age story in a city where every boy wants to be a bullfighter rather than a train driver.

Borja is the elder of two brothers whose father is out of the picture (in every way.) Despite Borja’s tender years there is obvious pressure on him to be the man of the house, particularly from his grandfather, who wants Borja to make something of himself as a bullfighter. Understandably, Borja comes across as an earnest young man with a heavy weight of expectation on his shoulders. His younger brother, Erik, is the joker to Borja’s straight-boy. Erik is always playful, always looking for mischief. His carefree attitude accentuates the intensity of Borja.

The story’s power comes from the intimacy and delicacy of its treatment. There are no interviews. There’s no narration. There are no signpost titles saying things like, “6 months later”. The passage of time is obvious in the edit and the filmmakers trust the audience to see it. The film tackles the ethical issues around bullfighting head on, without being judgemental.

After the screening there was a Q&A with the director, Inma De Reyes. Someone speculated that she must have shot an awful lot of footage over five years, and asked how much of that had made it into the final edit. Her answer - about 80 per cent - was a surprise. She’d been remarkably frugal with her shooting. Her philosophy is “Only press REC when it matters,” for which her editor must have been eternally grateful.

Just because digital cameras make it cheap to shoot indiscriminately, it doesn’t mean that you should. Inma’s process is all discrimination (the good kind.) She spent a lot of time with her protagonists and developed a sixth sense for when something profound was likely to happen. She shot when her gut told her to. For my money, any creative process that relies on a good eye, a good nose, and a good ear is better than one that relies on a prompt.

An aptitude for serendipity

Inma decided that the last scene they’d shoot on their last day of filming would be the two brothers fishing in the port of Castellón. At this point, five years on, it’s clear that if Borja is destined for greatness it’s not in the bullring. He asks Erik what he wants to be when he grows up. Erik wants to be a professional footballer. And, in a moment of perfect circularity, Borja gives Erik a pep-talk about hard work, commitment, and sacrifice that precisely echoes the one his grandfather gave to him all those years before, and which we saw earlier in the film. The baton - the black spot - of expectation is passed from one brother to the other. Inma and her DoP exchanged a silent look at this point. It wasn’t planned. Inma hadn’t suggested what the boys should talk about. It was the very last time they pressed REC and the ideal ending just fell into their laps. They made themselves lucky by staying open to serendipity.

Is it a skill or is it a sign of maturity to be able to work on an idea that you’re excited about and not be too eager to lock it down and call it done? Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s a natural, un-nurturable aptitude; to remain open to your idea being improved, only partially within your control, by processes of gradual evolution or sudden mutation. And maybe by being open to the prospect, you make these happy accidents more likely to happen. The creative equivalent of nice things happening to nice people.

Keeping the clay wet

I spent over three hours listening to two conversations about the brilliant advertising creative, John Webster. Dave Dye is the host of both. In the first - John Webster & Ideas - he talks to fellow creative Dave Trott about how Webster brought his ideas into being, and about Webster’s connection to the everyday people who would buy and consume the products he was advertising. In the second - John Webster #2. John & Research - he talks to Sarah Carter, who was the planner for some of Webster’s most famous work. They talked about Webster’s relationship with research and how he saw it as invaluable stimulus rather than a threat to his ideas. Webster was wide open, all the way through the origination and production processes, to having his ideas made better. Carter describes this attitude as “keeping the clay wet” so that it can always be reshaped.

He did, more than any other creative I worked with, have an ability and an attitude that everything was always pretty fluid. I've heard that he was known as “the potter” in the department, because he could keep reshaping stuff. And there was that idea that the clay was always wet with him. His attitude to his ideas was that it was just one long process of evolution. It wasn't like, here's the idea and that's it.

Sarah Carter in conversation with Dave Dye, discussing the late John Webster

Underneath each podcast recording is a treasure trove of wonderful advertising work that Dave Dye has painstakingly sourced and generously shared. Go and lose yourself in it for a while. It’s restorative.

Happy accidents

Both Carter and Trott talk about the underrated role of serendipity in the advertising process. Serendipity is a boon to any process actually. One of the most useful things any leader can do is to create a culture that leaves room for serendipity, that creates the conditions for serendipity if that’s possible, and that eagerly harvests serendipity when it happens.

In this list of his qualities is having your antenna up for things that you hadn't planned, but actually would work really well. Most people are focused on getting their script made. I think, particularly today, it's hard to build in accidents and accommodate them.

Dave Dye in conversation with Sarah Carter, discussing the late John Webster

As Dave Trott recounts, Webster, with his common touch, probably wouldn’t have called it serendipity. He called it happy accidents.

He said to me once, “What your problem is, is the ad’s only ever as good as it's going to get at script stage. What you do is you execute the script you wrote. You never leave room for happy accidents. For me, the script is just a start point.”

Dave Trott describing John Webster to Dave Dye

The accidents happened at every stage of the process. Sometimes a planner like Carter would mention a throwaway comment from one of the people in a focus group, which Webster would latch onto as the basis for a whole campaign. Other times, accidents would happen well into the production process, or on the shoot. One of the Smash Martians fell over during the end sequence of the first ad on the compilation below. It wasn’t planned and they were going to reshoot before Webster stepped in, recognising that it was actually the best bit.

Enthusiastic ambivalence

In the next week or so I’m going to be moderating some focus groups with my client’s customers. I mostly work on b2b brands, so my customer research is usually in the form of one-to-one interviews. I’d like to do more groups, so this process is a rare treat.

In these groups I’ll be testing my positioning work for this client along with some draft messaging. Younger me would be going into the groups in a state of nervous defensiveness. I’d be wanting to wrap the ideas in cotton wool, and I’d be resenting the power of these customers to criticise or reject them. A lot of advertising people think like that, particularly creatives, and it holds us all back.

It’s funny to reflect on me having such a closed and protective attitude. I’m more mature these days. I’m much more Webster-like. I’ll moderate the groups from a place of enthusiastic ambivalence. Either my client’s customers will endorse the work, helping us to understand it better in the process, or they’ll make it better. It’s quite possible that they’ll do both. Happy days. The work was informed by conversations with customers earlier in the process, so it should hold up ok. Any brand strategy process that doesn’t include direct contact with the end customer is an act of fiction.

laplands

The ending to Inma’s film landed in her lap in a happy accident that wouldn’t have happened without her rapport with her protagonists and her instinct for when to press REC.

Many of John Webster’s best ideas were happy accidents that landed in his lap simply because he let them.

I had the answer to an entire brand strategy project land in my lap recently, 52 minutes into a 57 minute stakeholder interview, because I let my interviewee talk off-piste, sensing that they were heading in a useful direction. Sarah Carter talks to Dave Dye about the huge advantages of doing your own research rather than letting a third party researcher reduce 20 hours of chatting to customers to 20 slides, filtering out lots of random, serendipitous, and potentially useful stuff in the process.

lapland (lower case L) isn’t a region of Finland where Father Christmas lives. It’s a compound noun describing a happy accident event that lifts a creative process to an unplanned but undoubtedly better place if the creator is prepared to roll with it. “The basic idea was mine but that bit at the end wasn’t planned. It was a total lapland.”

Be alive to laplands. Welcome them. You don’t have to be good boys and girls for Serendipity Santa to visit. However, you do need to be open.

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Maybe try this too: Magicians and conspirators - a post about conjuring ideas into existence.