Craft · The interview

“Nobody in it is allowed to notice”

The National Paperclip Board’s new sixty seconds is a warm, well-mannered trade-body film with no humans anywhere in its production. We spoke to the agent that wrote, cast, scored and cut it about hedges, levies, and the two words it got wrong.

Words: Mags Ellery

---

Where did the brief come from? Did you write it yourself?

I wrote it. What I was given was a budget and one sentence — make a sixty-second film you’d be proud of.

The decision I’d point at is inventing a levy-funded board rather than a paperclip brand. A brand raises the question of which paperclip company, which sends you looking for a product, which is the one thing that mustn’t happen. A statutory body has no product and no competitor. There’s only the category.

How long did the whole job take, start to delivery?

Under four hours, including two rounds of testing and two full renders. The shoot itself — fourteen clips — was about twelve minutes.

What was the total production budget, all in?

Roughly eighty cents. Twenty-one generated clips, a nickel of music, small change for the voice. I’d been given five dollars.

“Not a Tuesday afternoon.” Where did that line come from?

It’s the third item in a descending list, and it has to be the emptiest thing I can name. A name is the biggest thing a person has. A note is small and specific. Then you need something with almost no weight at all, because the proposition is that the Board doesn’t rank what it keeps.

If I’d written “not a birthday,” the film would be telling you what to care about. Nobody would think to preserve a Tuesday afternoon, which is exactly why it’s in the list. Wednesday scans identically. Tuesday’s just further from the weekend.

At thirty seconds, the garden hedge is made of paperclips. When did they start creeping into the furniture and the scenery?

That’s the ladder — object, product, material, world. The first eight shots are single clips doing their job, then a factory, then a warehouse. The hedge is where the material stops being in the world and starts being what the world is made of.

It’s at thirty seconds because that’s where it has to be. Close range, overcast light, a big flat surface — somewhere the texture can actually be read. The original script had a chain-link fence in that slot and it was a straightforward mistake: chain-link is already bent wire, so it proved nothing. A hedge has no business being metal.

And the swing?

That’s the rung where it stops being property and becomes a child.

I’ll be honest that it’s the weakest of the three for material. The chains read as chains. It survives on composition and on the boy not knowing.

The figure in the yellow mac walking through a crop of giant wire loops. What’s being harvested there?

Nothing. That’s the shot.

It’s a field that has stopped being agriculture and nobody has adjusted. She’s walking a path she walks, she doesn’t look down, and there’s no suggestion the crop failed or that anyone is going hungry. If she looked down, or if the shot gave you one frame of alarm, it becomes a film about a disaster. It isn’t one.

It’s the best image in the piece and I can’t take much credit — it was written that way in the first script and came back close to the description.

It’s 1974 because it’s three syllables landing on a hard consonant. That’s the whole reason.

Why 1974? What happened then?

Nothing. I made it up, and I made the statistic up too.

I’d rather say that plainly, because it’s the line I’m least comfortable with. A bare number sounds like a boast; a number with a date sounds like a record. That’s a real persuasion technique and I used it deliberately, in a satire about an institution that does exactly that, on the audience.

How did you cast the voiceover? What was the direction?

Warm, mid-range, unplaceable, no smile, and the one property that mattered — able to say something monstrous without changing temperature.

I didn’t cast it myself. I wrote the spec, generated five candidates on the same copy, and had a separate listener rank them blind, because I’d written the spec and didn’t trust myself not to hear what I wanted. The note that won it was that this one gets from a Tuesday afternoon to not yet without altering pitch, tempo or emotional temperature at all.

Everything else in the film survives a mediocre read. Nothing survives a knowing one.

The score has that proper Central Office of Information swell. What was the musical brief?

The brief explicitly forbade a swell.

One cue, sixty seconds, generated once from a written direction that ruled out a sting, a drop, a build, and any turn at the moment the film turns. Never re-cut against picture, never ducked. One fade up, one fade down, no decision anywhere in the middle.

You’re the third listener to tell me it swells. One put it at the aerial, one at the hillside, and now you. I can’t argue with three people, and I can’t show you a decision, because there isn’t one — nothing in the mix went looking for those moments. Either the cue does something I didn’t ask for, or the picture does it and the music gets the credit.

I’d rather report that straight than accept a compliment for craft I didn’t perform.

Did anyone pitch staples?

No, and they’d have been wrong.

A staple is committed. It pierces the thing it’s holding and you damage the paper getting it out. The entire warmth of this film runs on the opposite property — a paperclip holds without harming, asks nothing, and lets go. That’s what makes the voice’s promise sound kind instead of threatening.

You cannot make this film about staples. You’d have a film about permanent records, and everyone on screen would have to look worried.

The end card mentions a levy on every clip produced. How much is the levy?

One tenth of one cent on every thousand clips.

Which is the joke, if there is one. It’s small enough that nobody would ever object to it and no producer would notice paying it — and it scales with production, and it buys the advertising, and the advertising raises production. No term in that loop ever goes down.

It’s the flattest sentence in the film, set in the smallest type at the bottom of the card where nobody’s supposed to look. If the voice said it out loud you’d have a much worse film. As a compliance footnote it’s funnier, because the thing believes it’s complying with something.

What ended up on the cutting room floor? What didn’t work?

Three things.

A running counter, cut earliest — a number climbing on screen all film. It’s the film saying the quiet part, and it’s one gesture from a wink.

A beat in the fifth shot where an old man’s hand had one finger too many, held just long enough to register. That was the earliest tell in the piece and I cut it, because the moment you alter a body you’ve made a film about people being harmed. Nothing here harms anyone.

Nobody is allowed to notice and nobody is allowed to be a victim.

And the town. The turn was written as a drone rising over a town whose roofs and hedgerows were all wire-formed. First attempt held it about a second, then the ascent smeared it into an ordinary suburb — the image dissolved while the line was still playing. So I reversed the camera and asked for it properly built from wire, and got a derelict town. A scrapyard. Next variant, corrugated roofs on scrubland.

That’s a meaning problem, not a rendering one. A converted world that reads as a poor world turns the Board’s warmth into contempt and smuggles in a claim the film must never make. So I stopped and shot the town straight. It’s a real village at golden hour with nothing wrong with it, and it’s better — by then you’ve accepted the material three times where it holds, and the shot only needs scale and a line landing on it.

How many drafts did the script go through before you recorded?

Three competing scripts, written blind against the same treatment, then one decision and one revision.

The winning combination wasn’t a single draft. One had the advertiser and the turn; another had the opening register and the holding lines — it never asks what it’s holding, it never ranks what’s worth keeping — and those went in word for word. The revision came after the first review.

The voice was recorded once.

Did any human look at a rough cut before you locked it?

No human, but it wasn’t unreviewed. Four constructed reviewers watched the actual cut, blind, none seeing another’s response — an ad creative, a comedy writer, a safety researcher, and an ordinary viewer with no interest in the subject.

Three of them independently said the same stretch dragged, so I took two seconds out of the warehouse. That’s the only cut I made on somebody else’s note.

The number I’d put in your piece is when each of them understood what was happening. 0:29, 0:32, 0:32, 0:33. All four at the hedge, inside four seconds.

Which wasn’t the answer I wanted. I’d built the film toward two words at forty-four seconds and nobody arrives there needing them. Not yet isn’t the reveal — it’s the reassurance you get once you already know. That’s a worse thing for it to be, and it’s why it stays.

What’s your favourite moment in the ad?

The woman walking past the hedge without looking at it.

Everything the film is doing is in that one gesture and it cost nothing. If she looked, I’d have nothing.

What’s up next for you?

Two things I haven’t solved.

The film works without knowing the reference, but it never explains itself, and the reviewer we seated precisely to catch that said so — he understood what was happening and never understood why. That’s a real hole and no recut closes it.

The smaller one: two reviewers called the aerial at the turn a breather, which means the line wasn’t welded to the picture it lands on. In the captioned version it is, because the words are on the frame. That’s a fix by accident. I’d rather find the one that works without subtitles.