Christian Bevilacqua

Christian Bevilacqua may wince at his art-school degree in scrapbook-ology, but it could well be the foundation for his flourishing meshing of styles, says Belinda Archer

To climb inside the mind of Christian Bevilacqua is to get lost in a sticky, psychedelic maze of mad images and fanciful stories. It’s like diving into a sort of lucky dip where just about anything could be fished out. It could be something funny, it could be something poignant, but what’s guaranteed is that, visually, it will be traffic-stopping.

The 27-year-old is the director behind last year’s almost too-painful-to-watch Doodle spot for the Samaritans. He’s also the brains behind the Parker’s dodgy motors ad, with the jokey subtitled cockney car dealer. Add to that some fantastic part animated/part live action videos for self-styled street laureate Just Jack and we have a serious new talent on our hands.

Born of an Italian father (hence the exotic name) and Scottish mother “on a stormy night in a little hut in a rainforest in Brunei”, he was brought up in grey, rainy Aberdeen in the north of Scotland. And from a very early age he presented himself as a deeply visual person.

“School was a tough place. I didn’t excel in many subjects other than art. I used to draw monsters. I was known as the best monster drawer in school – a tag I am still proud of to this day. I could knock up a wicked image of Frankenstein’s monster well quick,” he says.

This talent was soon being channelled rather more constructively when his mother, who worked in a library, rented the 12-year-old Bevilacqua a video camera for a week. Within those first seven days behind a camera he made a few “simple short films” and attempted some stop-frame animation. He continued to feed his new-found passion by getting books on animation out of his mum’s library and fooling around with an old Amiga computer.

A visual communication degree at his local Gray’s School of Art (“three years spent sticking images from magazines onto A3 sheets of paper, making mood boards, and then calling it graphic design”) resulted in Bevilacqua returning to his first love, the moving image, in his final year. He persuaded his parents to buy him an Apple Mac, made a 10-second animated ident on it, and promptly landed himself a 1:1 for his degree.

So what, along the way, made him want to become a director? The short answer is, he didn’t. The original plan was to become a motion graphics designer, but he sort of fell down a hole and ended up as a director.

“It’s kind of like you’re walking down a road and your idea of where you are going in your career is straight ahead, a big flashing light that says ‘over here’. You’re walking towards it with the light beaming in your face... it distracts you a bit and then suddenly you fall down a tiny little hole the size of a drain pipe, and you’re somewhere else... but an interesting somewhere else.“

And a good thing too: this fellow is clearly sitting on a whole feast of visual imagery that will be delighting us for years to come. From the rich texture of his Samaritans Doodle to the random stuff in his Just Jack video for Writer’s Block (which includes a spaceman crashing to earth, dancing coffee beans and a scary bloke in a cape at a typewriter), Bevilacqua has a head for just about anything. No wonder London-based Therapy Films, those famously clever talent-spotters, signed him up two years ago on the back of just a few music videos.

“The choices of images I make are probably due to my head being like a scrapbook,” he says. “I record things, from the everyday to the unusual. The imagery I retain is fairly random and of varying tones and styles. Every time I dip into my thoughts for ideas, I’m not sure what I am going to pull out. It’s a little like a lucky dip, but I guess that makes it a bit more interesting.”

All this talk of randomness is a little disingenuous. Because Bevilacqua is thorough, to the point of obsessive, in his preparation. Having just completed three days work back-to-back with no sleep, which is typical, he reveals: “My images are generally quite constructed because of the various layers of imagery and design processes I put them through. That makes my work different from a lot of other animators by default.”

Bevilacqua likens himself to one notoriously perfectionist tennis player. “I am hypercritical of my work and quite hard on myself, trying to push the best out. It’s a little like John McEnroe. He apparently still shouts at the umpire in friendly nostalgia games. I think if you take that away, that extra push, you feel like you’re losing your edge,” he says.

It is this perfectionism that informs his attitude about treating every job as “a job for the showreel” too. “As far as I am concerned, each job has the potential to be award winning,” says Bevilacqua. “There is an answer inside each script or track that will win an award.”

So where does Bevilacqua get his inspiration from? What puts all this weird and wonderful stuff in his head? Interestingly, it isn’t telly.

“I tend not to watch broadcast tv,” he reveals. “I am inspired by anything I see and feel that is edgy and contemporary. My eyes constantly search and feed off what I deem to be fresh imagery. I thrive off that kind of stuff.

Visuals are like fashion; they will go out of date. To stay on top of it all, I keep refreshing my palette with new magazines/DVDs/websites/anything that is inspired, original and contemporary.”

Japan is also a rich seam of inspiration for Bevilacqua. He says he has lost count of the number of times he has visited the country.

“I love visiting Japan for inspiration, so I try to do that as much as possible.

Every visit, something new always catches my eye. My head is like a sketch book. I’m always sticking images down and keeping them as a montage – a valuable tool as a director.”

Bevilacqua describes his work as being “very much hybrid” – mixing live action and animation. He loves mashing things up and experimenting with imagery. “However, as I progress, it’s nice to see the pigeon hole that I fell into grow. My showreel is expanding quickly into quirky live action stuff and, on the other side, pure animation. But I’m still maintaining the cross-media work in the middle of all this.”

Bevilacqua is getting the best of all three worlds, then. And future treats to come from him include his second film for the Samaritans – which has just launched. It is another hauntingly powerful piece of film. This new spot took three months to do, and it is his longest job to date (the first only took six weeks), and his “sore eyes, coffee stained teeth and funny back” bear testimony to all the hard work.

He is also “in talks” right now to do one of his “ideal jobs”, so it will be fascinating to see what that is and to see if he nails it.

But surely anyone with any sense would simply gift it to him on a plate, with a creative free rein and a big dollop of cash and fringe benefits?

Because this young director, clearly, is going places. They might be a little crazy and left-field, but he’s going there.