The Work That Made Me with Paul Sharp

Paul> As a kid, I was a poster boy for the dangers of TV. I would literally park myself in front of the box on my parent’s deep pile carpet and work my way through a day of whatever was on - breakfast TV through to kids TV, soap operas through to news, and of course every cartoon you can imagine. And somewhere jumbled up amongst all that content there were ads.

Generally the jingles reign supreme in my memory by rule of earworm, but occasionally a campaign would cut through because it captured my imagination rather than trying to indelibly tattoo a rhyme onto my brain. One such was the Pure Genius Guiness campaign with Rutger Hauer. It was part of the pretentious, esoteric ad tradition of the 80s-90s that bloomed from Apple’s 1984 spot and was satirically galvanised in Homer Simpson’s Mr. Plow commercial. But there was something very alluring about the surrealist world of the white-topped man in black (being in Blade Runner didn’t harm) and consequently when I was old enough to brag my first beer, it was a Guiness that I glugged (soiled with cider and blackcurrent cordial, of course).

Paul> In the 90s, Tango were making better entertainment than most of the content they were sandwiched between. You’ve Been Tango’d has been labelled punk advertising, and its attitude is definitely punkish, but it’s writing and craft felt razor sharp and fine-tuned to bait a young generation including a totally hooked me. Fusing the sports populism of commentators and action replays with the Pythonesque surrealist impact of the orange maniacs, I remember at the time, feeling as slapped as the gormless guy at the market;

“…and people make this for a living?!” And then when Ray Gardener was later revealed in all his oversized, purple-panted glory, it was a done deal, I had to find a way to get in on this game.

Paul> I’ve always been a bit of a nerd and science fact and fiction have been the bread and butter of my nerdism. It’s those concepts that melt your mind and make you feel like the comfortable rug of reality has been pulled out from under your feet, that truly excite me.

The Dune series pulls out a lot of those rugs. Since reading it in my late teens I’ve gone back to reread the whole series four times, most recently in preparation for Denis Villneuve’s epic adaptation. Every time, I latch onto something new, whether that’s grand geopolitical metaphors or innovative twists on ideology. Despite the fact that there’s so much not to like about the future Frank Herbert has imagined, the detail, depth and world building is so immense that you find yourself regularly getting sucked back in, like a greedy hand dipping into a sandworm popcorn bucket.

Paul> Was a press campaign for Newcastle Brown Ale. The line we were working to was: Another Whopper From Britain’s Biggest Bottled Beer, so basically it was permission to write complete BS. We had ads for the likes of a safari holiday in Scunthorpe, a TV channel called The Drinking Channel (including full show listings) and a new Euro integration currency based on NBA bottle caps. It was all irresponsible stuff that would be completely impossible to get out now, but a lot of fun at the time.

Paul> There was a wave in the late 90s/early noughties of ideas that depicted a completely fabricated dumb way of doing something, coupled with a line that said, THERE’S A BETTER WAY TO (insert the thing the product/service does). It’s just lazy. The one that really got me fired up was a poster depicting a giant catapult on the cliffs of Dover with a person being pulled back ready to fly over to intercontinentally deliver a package. What a waste of a cross track poster. A great demonstration of how or why something actually works better takes some proper thought, but will always be more powerful.

Paul> Although I’m not a big fan of musicals, I do love the aesthetic of large-scale choreography. I also have a counterintuitive love of brutalist concrete forms and urban symmetry; I’m country raised and prefer the sticks to the big smoke. So, when I saw all this married together with a dystopian almost scifi attitude in Roman Gavras’s clip for Jamie XX’s “Gosh” (which musically combines some of my favourite proggy-tech and rave-days joy), I was and still am in awe and incredibly envious. To create and share a singular vision like that, “Oh my Gosh!”. Note: the original, 2001-type, astronomy-inspired clip for Gosh is also sublime.

Paul> It wasn’t one of mine but I sincerely wish the Inglorious Fruit and Veg campaign by Marcel for Intermarché was. It opened my eyes to what we can achieve in our industry with a united vision and desire to make positive cultural change by simply getting to the core of and solving a very real and costly client problem. The reach and impact of that campaign is so great that supermarkets around the world have adopted their own derivative packages for selling their ugly fruit and veg—in Woolworths, the biggest chain here in Australia, we have The Odd Bunch.

Paul> I’ve been blessed with having had the opportunity to fulfill my Tango-fueled ambition of creating and sharing dumb surrealist visions to a broad audience—imagine a guy playing jazz-flute to make his pet crab dance for an insurance brand! But I could never have imagined that I’d one day be helping make an important environmental film, Deep Rising with Jason Momoa (no, not the dodgy scifi flick with Jason Flemyng) and that I’d get to be sat with Jason Momoa and one of the world’s leading marine geologists, Sandor Mulsow, at Sundance for its premiere. Despite the weight of its story, it’s been a real privilege to work with some genuinely amazing individuals, all focused on trying to share a globally important message with Deep Rising.

Paul> There’s always a cringe or two on every project when you have to compromise on an aspect of the vision. My first film commercial was for Honda and it had a big budget for a really big vision made even more grandiose by a French director duo. However, whenever we questioned any aspect of that vision during the shoot we were met with the stock response,

“Probably, this will be done in post.” The result was definitely not the vision we had in mind, but some valuable lessons were learned.

Paul> Working alongside Deep Rising the movie, we’re currently developing an impact campaign to get people to take action to halt the imminent threat of deep-sea mining: an area of the Pacific the size of Europe is poised to be exploited for EV battery metals we don’t even need (the world’s biggest EV manufacturer does not use Nickel, cobalt and manganese). With the cost to crucial ecosystems looking catastrophic the stakes are super high as is the importance of the campaign’s salience. We’re crossing everything that enough ducks can align and that the gods of luck and fate deliver our pleas for help from far and wide to make it coalesce into the potent change shifter we all need it to be 🙏.