Kyra Bartley: Making magic

To say it was unexpected is an understatement,” says Kyra Bartley of winning Director of the Year at the shots Awards Asia Pacific 2023. 

“I’m amazed at how much love my work from last year has picked up, and it makes it so much more meaningful when it’s pieces you love the most that are getting recognition.”

Those pieces include The Reluctant Shanty for UNHCR and Vodafone Smart Network. For the former, she says, “The process of making it was the most humbling, rewarding, and challenging experience of my career so far. All of our talent were actual refugees, and one had never sung in front of another person before. Yet, here she was, determined to speak up and share her story. The way that the air left the set when she started singing, real tears rolling down her cheeks as memories surfaced, will stay with me forever.”

"[Vodafone] was the job that reignited my love of post and helped me understand how I could integrate it in my work in ways that felt interesting and creative and true to my style."

Vodafone, meanwhile, “was the job that reignited my love of post and helped me understand how I could integrate it in my work in ways that felt interesting and creative and true to my style, rather than needing it to be big, high-end, shiny VFX.” 

Above: The Reluctant Sea Shanty, for UNHCR, which helped Bartley pick up the shots Awards Asia Pacific Director of the Year award.

Featuring the voice of Stephen Hawking, a blizzard of visual cut-up imagery and touching on what David Tennant’s Doctor Who called “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff”, it’s a striking visual and conceptual head-twister. “That’s a testament to the support from DDB Aotearoa,” she says, “and Matty Burton (DDB's ECD), who pushed me to make it weirder, and then backed me fully when it came to selling the client on that weirdness. It’s that level of trust that’s now the standard to which I try to hold all my creative partnerships.”

"The industry itself was my film school, so it took me a while to start to feel the edges of who I might be as a director."

Her entry into advertising began with enrolling onto the wrong college course – video art. “I ended up spending my time working on various film sets instead of going to uni, so they kicked me out.” Which was good, because she’d already started a production company, making broadcast packages for high-level horse sports. “I produced and directed, plus hired teams of shooters and editors; it was chaos and I lost money on every job, but I loved learning on my feet and jumping into the deep end,” she remembers. 

To save on budget, she learnt basic animation and motion graphics, which was handy when she took a job at post house Heckler, working as an animator in hand-drawn and stop-motion styles. “The combination of art, design and tech really tickled my brain,” she says. “There’s something addictive about starting with a blank canvas and then creating this tiny kernel of life from nothing.”

Her first commercial directing job was a stop-motion spot for Ginseng Wine, made while living in Cambodia and setting up an animation studio there – the country’s first. “It involved a guy getting squashed by a giant bottlecap,” she recalls, “and I hope it doesn’t still exist online because it was so, so hilariously bad.” She was learning on the job, and fast, and as she says: “The industry itself was my film school, so it took me a while to start to feel the edges of who I might be as a director.” A decade, to be precise. “I fell in love with the process,” she says, “and got swept up in that world for a solid ten years.” 

Above: Bartley's film, Love is Love, saw her shortlisted for Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Directors’ Showcase at Cannes.

Then, in 2017, her film Love is Love (featuring no less than 120 artists celebrating l’amour in all its permutations) got her shortlisted for Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Directors’ Showcase at Cannes. “It was an opportunity to properly engage with all of the best work in the world for that year,” she says. “And it was like the blinkers fell away from my eyes, and I had a pretty intense realisation that live-action was the only way forward for me. As much as I loved animation, it wasn’t – at least in the commercial world – going to give me the depth and storytelling possibilities that I craved. So I started planning my move to live-action, which took the form of a move to FINCH.”

"Having an extra set of ears and a creative sounding board when I was starting out was so valuable in building confidence and understanding the game."

She joined its roster via a mentorship run by the Australian Director’s Guild and got to spend time on set with other directors. “Such an incredible resource,” she says now, “given how rarely we get to see our peers in action.” Directors such as Chris Nelius, Nick Ball and Alex Roberts helped her brainstorm and prep her first jobs at FINCH. “Having an extra set of ears and a creative sounding board when I was starting out was so valuable in building confidence and understanding the game,” she says. It’s something she endeavours to pass on to new directors today. “In such a competitive industry it can be tempting to feel protective of hard-earned knowledge but I believe in an open spirit when it comes to your creative community.”

Her first job came in her second week, a four-camera shoot with non-actors that had to be done in one take. “It was as far from the meticulous planning and incremental step-by-step of animation as is possible to get.” she exclaims, “and I loved it! It forced me to trust my instincts and adapt quickly in a way that post-led jobs never had.” 

Above: Vodafone's The Smart Network; another commercial which helped Bartley pick up the Director of the Year award.

That was six years ago, and she credits FINCH’s nurturing environment as a key to her success. “They believed in me, supported me and pushed me to succeed while allowing me to fail – being given the freedom to make mistakes, and then watch yourself crash and burn because of them, is probably the greatest level of support a production company could give a director trying to find their voice.”

As she eased into live-action, she focused on “embracing the rawness of real human interaction” in the hybrid landscape of doco-drama. One of the new skills she had to wrangle was getting the best out of talent. “I wanted to be a director who felt comfortable being in the trenches with the actors, able to speak their language and give them what they needed for good performances.” 

"[Finch] believed in me, supported me and pushed me to succeed while allowing me to fail."

So she jumped into the deep end and joined an acting workshop with New Zealand actor/teacher Miranda Harcourt. “It gave me a whole tool set to draw on to help ground actors in the moment and connect them to the space, which is integral to the naturalistic style of performance that I prefer. Good acting requires vulnerability and trust,” she adds, “so my first step is always to try and establish that as a priority.”

She describes the first rounds of casting as her “single favourite moment of a project – it’s normally the first point at which someone totally outside my brain takes what’s written on paper and makes it human. That shift from concept to reality is genuinely magical to witness.”

Some directors live for the shoot, others for the edit, but Bartley has a fondness for the prep. “Each part of the process has its beauty,” she says, “but, generally, the ideation would have to be my favourite. It’s when everything is still a possibility and your collective dreams haven’t been crushed by the restraints of budget, practicality and the client’s previously unexpressed aversion to the colour green. It’s the feeling before all that, when all those hours of research suddenly click. As clichéd as it sounds, it absolutely feels like a light bulb turning on in my brain, and it never fails to thrill me. It’s the feeling I always come back to when the realities of production start squeezing in.”

Above: The trailer for Bartley's short documentary Losing Lena.

In 2019, she helmed the documentary short Losing Lena, dissecting the tech world’s inbuilt values of misogyny and discrimination, buried deep in the matrix as the Playboy image of Lena, chosen by some coder guys in the early 1970s as a ‘test image’, that’s still a default test image in computer science today. “It’s a dive into the deep end of how images and narratives shape our understanding of the world,” she says, “especially in the context of gender and technology. It was an eye-opener to the pervasive issues in STEM [Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics], brought to light through the story of that single image.”

STEM and creativity may be divided in college courses, but not in the creative industries. One of the new innovations to enter the production process is AI. How far that intelligence will bore through the creative industries is yet to be known. For some, it’s a case of fear and loathing, but for Bartley, it’s a welcome new creative assistant. “AI is a playground for rapid experimentation and iteration,” she says. “It lets me take ideas mentally catalogued from real life - from galleries, from films and online - then filter them through a chaos engine and let them take on wholly unexpected forms. It’s a different kind of conversation with my imagination, and while there are important conversations to be had around ownership and copyright, I welcome the way this tech will shake up how we perceive creativity.” 

"The ethos at the core of my work is a connection to humanity."

And creativity, she believes, remains firmly grounded on individual vision. “The most successful work presents itself with a strong perspective on the world, and that point of view necessarily comes from the director,” she says. “The ethos at the core of my work is a connection to humanity, so no matter the genre or tone of script, all of my decisions are likely to tap into that in some way. How that’s expressed - the visual style, the techniques, the performance - is the joy of the job.”