Steve Ayson has been nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in the Directors Guild of America awards. For the third time.

This time he’s nominated for The Great Chase, the first-ever Chinese New Year campaign for Nike.

The Wieden + Kennedy Shanghai script is based on the traditional Chinese Lunar New Year practice in which elders give hongbaos (red envelopes containing money) to their younger relatives.

“The local Shanghai production team explained that as children, gifting hongbao was a hilarious conundrum. You must politely decline the gift out of courtesy, yet there is also a point when you should politely receive it,” Ayson commented. “Playing with the dramatic situation of a child having to negotiate this, was a rich comedic opportunity that I seized.”

Ayson captured the “thrust and parry” of the game perfectly in the 90-second “action drama” accentuated by the humorous determination of aunty and child. “The finished film rides a dramatic high wire act, the aunty chasing the niece over decades to make her take the red envelope, elevating the ‘game’ to a new level,” Ayson noted.

The film was shot pre-Covid in Guangzhou, when the only things to worry about were mosquitos and traffic, although the shoot, Ayson admits, turned out to be gruelling. Ayson’s greatest pre-production worry, though, was casting the aunty. “I was struggling to find an actor I liked to play the aunty, when suddenly the local production team presented a woman with just the right level of comedic darkness and cheeky lightness I was after. Afterwards, the local producers (twin sisters) revealed that aunty was their mother. They said that when I described the character I was after, they immediately thought of their mum.”

Ayson was first nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in the DGA Awards in 2012 for Carlton Draught, Beer Chase, by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne which took just six days to reach two million views and is still considered to be one of Australia’s most outstanding beer commercials.

His second nomination came in 2018 for Speights, The Dance, by DDB New Zealand, a commercial that defied the blokey tradition of beer advertising and walked the tightrope of presenting a “mates story” with absolute finesse and a perfectly crafted dash of humour.

Nike’s The Great Chase was produced by MJZ, which represents him internationally. Ayson is repped in NZ and Australia by 3&7, “a burgeoning company gathering the best talent from around the world,” he notes, and the company that Ayson launched in 2018.

Here’s an Ayson sampler: