“It was just a personal passion project; born out of my own frustrations after a very difficult year in adland,” David Nobay says of ArtBreaks, an 8-part short film project that launched yesterday on ABC’s iView Arts channel. “To be honest, I just wanted to prove how much better we all are as creative people when we’re given the room to breathe. There was no money, no brand, no expectations. Just a poem, and bunch of friends who I let take it wherever they instinctively wanted.”
ArtBreaks began with a single poem penned by Nobay, which he unleashed to his creative friends to interpret as they wished. Those “friends” included acclaimed actor Colin Friels, the Sydney-based director and DOP Susan Stitt, and Gerard Masters, a jazz pianist who has worked extensively with Missy Higgins and Pete Murray.
What resulted was Snared, a short that investigates the anguish of loss and emotional paralysis. By chance, Snared was shared with Adrian Swift, then Head of Programming at the ABC. He was drawn to it as a creative experiment and saw the resulting films as a good fit for their ABC iView channel. He challenged Nobay to create more “adbreaks” and the series was born.
“I called them “artbreaks” because, in many ways, they’re the antithesis of ad breaks,” Nobay says. “Advertising has become increasingly linear, as opposed to lateral. It seems to me that, with marketing today, the outcome is agreed before you’ve really had any chance to start to experiment. ArtBreaks operates on the opposite axis: the only clue is my poem. I guess that’s our version of a “creative brief”.
“From there, the actor, musician and filmmaking team each improvise, based on their personal instinct and the path they’ve been left by the previous artist. For instance, I wasn’t present at any of the shoots or music sessions. We didn’t have any pre-production meetings. The only thing gluing the project together was a shared trust in each other’s taste levels and craft skills.”
By the time Nobay had completed the other seven poems, he had launched Marcel, a Sydney-based creative agency.
Four months later, and ArtBreaks is an impressive batch of eight films; each as filmically diverse as their subject matter…from the rubbish tips of Bangladesh, to the Top End of Australia, where acclaimed director Warwick Thornton shot the poem Ancient Eye (pictured), which he then had translated into local, native dialect. Another film Felled was shot by Australian director Tim Georgeson in the forests above Vancouver, while, closer to home, the poem Fidget and Foil is captured in the neon of Sydney’s late night clubland in The Cross.
ArtBreaks is now an established channel on the ABC Arts iView page and there are already four more films in production over the next few months.
The series is hosted on ABC’s iView Arts channel, as well as being shared via artbreaks.com.au.
