Director, Greg Bray, has a thing for comedy. The ex-agency creative director, New Zealand expat makes commercials that are warm, funny and absurd. Commercials whose humour underlines product benefits in a way you can’t ignore. The benefit to Bray of being a comedy master is that he gets to work throughout the world. He moved to Berlin (Bray’s wife is German) but works wherever the jobs come from – that might be Italy, France, Asia or the US.
Here’s his latest commercial, Broadband Envy, for Austria’s largest telco, Magenta.
“This was indeed a fun one to be involved in. Casting was, as always, key to the success of this spot. Produced through PPM Next in Vienna, with the talented guys at Jung Von Matt Donau, who fully embraced the absurdity and awkwardness we wanted to bring to this moment,” Bray commented.
Credits:
Client: Magenta Austria
Agency: Jung von Matt Donau
Production Company: PPM Next
DoP: Snorre Ruhe
Editor: Dennis Kasten
Colour: Nurali Kushkov @ Cameo Copenhagen
Music: Andy Hepburn
And there’s this spot, which plays on the stereotype of vegan food as boring:
“What I loved most about this script was the insight – acknowledging the fact that most people (vegan virgins) imagine vegan food to be tasteless and boring. The original agency script was centred around a young woman being presented a vegan snack by her doting partner and imaging the food being tasteless and bring and visualising it as sponge. We managed to take a step further by travelling into the mind of the young woman and visualising her “vegan nightmare”, in which her whole world transforms into a beige-on-beige tasteless world – until she is snapped out of it upon hearing that the vegan snack has been prepared with Vivre Vert spreadable cheese.
Credits:
Client: Vivre Vert
Agency: WNP Paris
Prod Company: Blue Paris
DoP: Mahdi Lepart
Editor: David Tessier
Music: Richard Blaha
Bray was born and raised in Auckland and pinged from studying visual communication at tech to working in advertising when one of his teachers told him to dump the course and work full-time at “one of the hottest creative agencies in NZ”, where he was creative director. “My first experience of honesty in advertising,” he notes.
Working on very tight budgets led to directing many of his own scripts. Bray had found his calling, along with a passion for comedy and casting memorable and unique characters, both of which have become hallmark features of his work. “Comedy is a universal language – a medium in which language is inevitably a bridge to understanding it. Of course, certain cultural nuances must be observed in different markets, but comedy is much more about timing, delivery and what every being on this planet finds funny,” he says.
