shots 159: B is for Budgen

Frank Budgen, director and co-founder of Gorgeous, is known for helming outstanding spots – such as Nike Tag, PlayStation Mountain, and NSPCC Cartoon – just not very often. But far from being lazy, the enigmatic polymath is busy producing photographs, sculptures, ‘squeeze’ paintings and music, plus redesigning the alphabet, time measurement and digital cameras. Another surprising fact about the ‘inadvertent genius’ is that he is virtually indestructible. He tells Carol Cooper about withstanding car crashes, cancer and being hit by a train

My first memories are pretty happy ones. We (my parents, sister and me) lived on a smallholding in Copthorne, a small village in a far away land called Sussex. There was a small field and a small wood with a stream running through it. We bred rabbits, reared chickens and grew flowers and vegetables that we sold locally. We had a couple of goats, two cats, a dog, one goldfish and two 12-bores.

I recall the winters being very cold, especially indoors. But the summers, or at least my memory of them, were so idyllic they would have made the Waltons cringe. I remember running through long grass and climbing fruit trees. And long days making hay with big swaphooks and pitchforks and Mam (Irish) bringing out jugs of iced lemonade for us and any local helpers.

We ate a lot of fresh food, and also quite a bit of buckshot from a pheasant or something my dad had shot. I once ate a plum while it was still on the tree, leaving the core hanging. Which I guess is as fresh as you can get. My friends would come round a lot as it was a great place for climbing trees or walking in the stream or making camps, either underground or out of the hundreds of seed boxes in one of the sheds.

One summer evening my dad collapsed in the garden. An ambulance arrived and took him away and I never saw him again. So that era was over. My mother sold up and we moved into a bungalow with a small lawn and a garden not much bigger than a window box.

I wasn’t exactly encouraged to be artistic as a child, but I did a lot of drawing just because I liked to. One year I won first prize at the village flower show with a drawing of a mallard. I felt a bit bad afterwards and owned up to my mum that I had traced the outline. I can’t remember her telling me off. I think she liked the certificate.

I don’t think I had any career aspirations as a child and there were no expectations of me.  I always wondered what I’d be when I grew up but never thought in terms of a career.

Sometimes I wish I’d maybe done something more useful or helpful to others or to the planet in some way. But I guess I’ve always been too attracted to the gloss and glitter of society, which I think is called culture or the arts.

Lately I have been doing more studio work than I used to. I did some about a year ago and, thanks to a very open-minded agency and relaxed client [Taylors of Harrogate], it was one of the most interesting processes I have been through. It wasn’t a big budget but we shot for several weeks. In fact, the prep was actually part of the shoot and the pre-production meeting took place on set. So rather than show storyboards, the client looked at sets and rigs and tests we had done, some of them already shot and on screen.

We hired the cheapest studio we could find, ending up in a photo studio that didn’t really have the ceiling height, but I made do. We hired art college leavers, painters, sculptors, and others who were just starting off or had little or no experience on set.

I hired a cheap consumer-level digital camera that didn’t shoot as fast as I would’ve liked. But a post production test showed it could stand up to being slowed down by 50 per cent. I was amazed as it was never possible to get away with that before. Apart from me and my producer, one spark and a rigger for a couple of days, there were no other grown-ups.

We made a lot of the props ourselves, did our own lighting, made some mistakes, but learned a lot more. We made a dolly out of a trolley on wheels with the camera strapped to it. With the aid of a cardboard arrow on the dolly pointing to lines drawn on the floor, we hand-pushed it on tracks and, despite its wobbly push-bar, it turned out to be a near-perfect motion-control rig. Every day was a part of the creative process rather than just a technical production. It was an environment I loved being in and I would happily have spent months working like that.

The agency and client were even up for showing all the lighting stands and wires holding the props, the track on the floor and all bits of marker tape everywhere. But, not for the first time, what ended up on screen was darker than it looked in telecine, and its naive simplicity and crudeness – which was what I thought was brave and charming – I don’t think came across. It was still a pretty unusual spot though, and had a great track and I hope it sells lots of… oh yes, coffee.

Over the years I’ve tried working in several different ways – from carefully storyboarding every shot and working out how long a short should take to shoot and how many seconds it would be in the cut, to shooting with no storyboard and being flexible enough to shoot whatever the circumstances offer. Mostly though, it’s a mixture of the two. I’ve tried every filter there is plus a few homemade ones, sometimes all at once, so you can’t see through the lens.

I’ve pushed cameras, lenses and stock to their limits and beyond. Opened the camera or shone light into it while it is filming. Tampered with their mechanisms, used a jam jar for a lens, or sound tape for film. Other times I have shot completely clean, occasionally using just one lens for the whole job.

Although I like doing humour or storytelling I also enjoy non-narrative, or even abstract work, based on visuals or sound.

It’s been strange how I have often received a script that was uncannily close to whatever personal stuff I was working on at that time. Some of my references for my jobs have been material I had previously researched for myself. For Cancer Research [Enemy] and Taylors of Harrogate [Welcome To Coffee] I even had drawings and photos that I had recently done.

Gorgeous was never set up to be hugely profitable financially, and we have certainly fulfilled that aim. Peter and Paul (like the proverbial dickie birds) flew away [Peter Thwaites and Paul Rothwell left Gorgeous in 2013], but a few directors have joined either in the US or the UK, including Patrick [Daughters] who is with us in both London and LA and is off to a really good start. We’d like to take on one or two more directors soon. But we’re not very good at courting. It’s more reserve than coolness but I guess we’ll have to learn to be a bit more up-front.

I find it hard to believe that, after all this time, our main directors are still ridiculously dedicated to trying to do the best work they can.

To get the award for winning the most awards [at the D&AD 50th Birthday awards in 2012] is pretty ridiculous sounding, but whereas I’ve forgotten about a lot of my awards, this one does mean something to me. As a kid just out of art college, I remember sitting at my first D&AD ceremony, almost open mouthed at the TV and cinema work that Hugh Hudson, Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne and Ridley Scott were doing. Then, a year or so ago, in what seems like the blink of the eye, I get called up as the joint most awarded director in the 50 years of D&AD, still feeling pretty much like that awkward youth.

I used to limit myself to producing about four spots a year. But I don’t knock them out at that rate any more.

Although I’m known mainly for my commercials, I’ve probably spent as much, or more, time on other more personal projects. I still play around with a keyboard and bits of software. I often do a guide track to edit to. I don’t tell the agency it’s my music and never push it, but once or twice it has nearly ended up as the final piece.

As well as about 40 years of taking photographs, I’ve also been playing around with paint and pigments, drawing or making 3D models (real 3D, not the two-dimensional 3D that the CGI world use to confuse the rest of us). A lot of it is abstract and experimental, involving dropping, squeezing and generally torturing or mixing liquids that don’t always react well to being mixed – a bit like what has been going on in my own body recently [see next page]. I’ve combined pixels and pigments in photo-paintings and learned to paint out of focus. Sometimes I can’t tell if an image is printed or painted, or a bit of both. I like to work in a random, sometimes chaotic way, whenever I can, making copious notes and conclusions that I never again refer to. I have done a few sculptural pieces based on the sun. And one pretty ambitious one based on its shadow, which would commemorate an annual event, ideally in a large public area, that I would like to get commissioned. I also have another, equally ambitious one, that would need a very large indoor space, like the Tate’s Turbine Hall. So, dear Nicholas Serota, I don’t suppose you’re reading this, but…

I’m usually as busy when I’m not working as when I am. I never really think of it as work, but I’m always doing something. And I always have a camera in my hand.

I get tunnel vision and I can devote hours working on, or thinking about, some random thought or idea. I have been doodling around with numbers for a while and I seem to have come up with a new numerical system. It’s based on the binary system, but also keeps the decimal point. It’s very simple, but I think it could turn out to be vastly superior to either the imperial or metric systems. I need to work out if it’s flawed, and also if I am an inadvertent genius or a self-delusional idiot. 

Other projects are redesigning the clock and recalculating the way we measure time, doing away with random measures like 24 (hours) and 60 (minutes) in favour of my new numerical system, once it’s become universally recognised.

I’ve also had a go at editing and redesigned the English alphabet, but it really needs a thorough going over. I once had a stab at trying to redesign the way music is written using different colours, but soon gave up on that one.

Recently I have become a bit concerned about my house. I have been taking light studies of it for several months and it does not seem to be travelling around the sun at a constant speed and I’m not entirely sure what to do about this.

I have a home-movie project which is chugging along. But with about 200 hours of footage to cut down to about one hour, it is turning into a bit of a marathon.

My daughters are making a short, stop-frame animation, with the help of their toys, me and anyone else, usually Chris Palmer, who drops by. We all get so excited waiting to see the rushes and the on-set dialogue and squabbles are hilarious.

That reminds me, I have also been designing a new digital stills camera. Weirdly, digital cameras are still designed on traditional film cameras’ limitations. This one would give equal emphasis to the fact that there are now, with the ability to change the ISO for every shot, three rather than two ways of determining each exposure. Although quite different, it would be pretty classic looking and would be very simple, lightweight and near silent. A bit like a Leica, but it wouldn’t take three days to focus.

I’m not sure which are my personal favourites from my own commercials… there are a few Nike spots, including Tag. PlayStation Double Life and Mountain. Guinness Snails. Reebok Sofa. Twisted and Rubbed, both for Levi’s. And maybe a few smaller ones like Volkswagen UFO and Tumble for Pepe Jeans. I’ve probably missed out one or two. Actually what I’m really trying to say is I love everything that I’ve ever done.

What stimulates my creative juices? Words like ‘stimulate’ and ‘juices’ are a good start. Talking about something too much tends to sap my creative juices.

The best day of my career was over the three days when I was shooting a Nike job in London. Saturday evening I went home, then rushed my girlfriend to hospital. Sunday was a down day, and that morning my first-born popped out into the world. That evening we were all back home, and the next day I was back on set. Our second daughter wasn’t born anywhere near a shoot, but I would still say it was the other best day of my career.

In terms of what’s more important, personal artistic fulfilment or success for the brand, I do have a genuine consideration for the product and how it and its message will come across. Without that, the most humorous or beautiful or well-told piece of filmmaking just won’t work.  

If I could time travel just once, I’d travel about two seconds forwards, and stay there.

The single greatest human invention is custard. The worst? Gods.

When did I last cry? Sorry, I have ‘dry-eyes’ and I don’t have enough spare moisture for tears.

I’m not sure what my greatest weakness is. Self discipline? Or maybe finishing things? No. Making decisions? Oh, I don’t know.

What is the closest I’ve come to death? Well… if like cats, we have nine lives, I started getting through mine during my Copthorne years. I once fell from a high tree and landed, splat, face down and spread out like a starfish. I think, because I landed so perfectly flat I was bruised everywhere, but nothing broken or worse.

Another time I was on my bike and was hit, head-on, by a car. I rolled off the bonnet and onto the road. A small crowd gathered, I got up but couldn’t find my bike, then someone spotted it about 30 yards down the street. The bike was ruined but the driver took me home and all I had was a couple of small grazes.

My third kamikaze attempt involved driving a scooter flat-out into a ditch. We weren’t old enough to ride on the road but I somehow had an old two-seater scooter that me and my friends would ride up and down my long drive. I adopted a low-crouch, high-elbowed comedy riding position, but I slipped off the back of the front seat and couldn’t get back up. I could barely reach the handlebars and couldn’t steer or slow down. I shot out of the drive across the main road, as the scooter went into the ditch I jumped and flew (sans helmet) through a hedge into a neighbour’s garden. The scooter was a write-off, but again I walked away with only scratches. There have been other close calls too – one involved a 12-bore cartridge, a vice, a nail and a hammer – but I don’t think the stories live up to their potential.

Later, in my teens, I had a few more close shaves. Two of these were rolling and writing off cars. One of these was a dramatic, high-speed stunt with the car flying sideways between two large trees. As before, the vehicles were a write-off, but I came away unscathed. Apart from a miss-hit golf drive that whistled past one ear, bounced off a tree behind me and whistled past my other ear, nothing too threatening came close for a while.

In my professional career, things perked up a bit. In Rio, I was mugged at knifepoint by a gang of kids from the favela and I stupidly fought back until I felt the knife against my ribs. Another was in Kenya, when I was hit by a train and tumbled about 100ft down an embankment.

The most recent [close shave] was when I was diagnosed with leukaemia and, because of its type, my chances were not good. But I managed to pull through fairly easily and have been free of cancer ever since.

The worst days of my personal life were when I was cold and skint and sometimes hungry for a lot of my first year in Manchester [Metropolitan University]. That wasn’t much fun. But I have had quite a few ridiculously fabulous times.

I think the best times have been simply hanging out at home, on a warm summer Sunday with my kids, and maybe their mum, possibly a friend or two dropping in. There wouldn’t be anything we had to do. But I’d have spent some time doodling ideas or writing thoughts or taking a few photos.

Things that make me angry are… Impoliteness. Being told things that are not correct. People standing too close in queues. Town planners letting developers destroy London to turn it into a high-rise housing estate. Pollution. Most things nuclear. Injustice. Wars. Pretty much everything in the news.

If I was prime minister for one day, I would ban tobacco.

How would I like to be remembered? I like Woody Allen’s answer when he was asked what he’d like people to say about him in 100 years time, and he replied, ‘Hey you look good.’