MOB Rule: Chris Gaffey and Mob Films
The Drum joins former BJL creative Chris Gaffey on set
As an advertising creative, there can be nothing more satisfying than seeing your ‘Big Idea’ come to life, fleshed out into a fully formed ad. But that eventual realisation of your eureka moment more often than not follows a restless journey from first flashes of inspiration, via the delicate bureaucracy of client approval, to the moment it finally breaks. For Chris Gaffey, a creative for 22 years, that wait - from first scripts and sketches to actually getting the ad made - was, you suspect, proving a little trying. In his own amiable way, he tells The Drum when we join him on his first shoot since swapping ad agency BJL for film company The Mob, the time felt right to trade conceptualising ideas for bringing them to life.
“You can spend many months writing an idea, many weeks and months debating it and taking it through research, and then you’ve got to sell this vision to a client and encourage them to pay for it to be made, and this adds up to a very long and quite stressful process,” he tells us between takes on a Christmas commercial at Salford’s Pie Factory studios. “The magic, the most enjoyable bit for me, was always actually getting there at the shoot and seeing it come to life through the camera.”
At The Mob North, based a short walk across Manchester from previous employer BJL’s Sunlight House, Gaffey will direct, for agencies and clients, the kind of campaigns he was once penning. He is no novice as a director though, having started to get his hands dirty on shoots over five years ago.
Ambitions
“I suppose I’ve harboured this ambition [to direct] throughout my years as a creative. Quite often I’d be sat on a set and I’d be thinking something - like, it would be a bit better if the camera did this - and I wouldn’t quite have the bottle to say it to the director. As I’d be thinking that though, the director would then say the same thing out loud. That gave me the belief that maybe I did have the eye for this, maybe I could do it.”
The Salfordian started his career as a junior art director in 1986, and the intervening 22 years have taken him to senior positions at CheethamBell, MagneticNorth and finally BJL, with three years of freelance work across Manchester and Leeds in between. Being from that side of the River Irwell, he’s a devout Man United supporter, and he dissects the finer points of the Reds’ season as we adjourn for lunch. As we turn back to his career, he talks keenly about the new challenge which has put paid to any danger of him becoming advertising’s equivalent of football’s Journeyman Pro over the coming years.
Gaffey’s senior agency roles and the experience gained working freelance across the north has served as an apprenticeship, he acknowledges, and has afforded the confidence for him to pursue his true passion. “Any creative that works for good agencies, on big accounts, gets to work with great directors. I’ve been lucky that I worked with some really talented directors when I was a creative. So I learnt from them, observing the craft that goes into making a commercial. The art of directing an ad takes some learning because everything has to neatly fit into a jigsaw piece: it’s a very tight, carefully choreographed story.”
Of course, crafting something so delicate brings with it its own challenges. “Like one time in Walsall,” he grins, recalling an outdoor shoot for Jaguar. “We had this Jag jacked up and propped up on blocks, all primed and pristine in the street; it was freezing cold, February, and we - all the crew - were sat around waiting for the sun to come up. Early morning workers were walking past and one guy walked towards the car, peered in, and then just got in! We were like, Oh no, the fingerprints on the car we’d carefully shined up! Yeah, Walsall had its challenges. A group of scallies on BMXs came over just to cause havoc - one of them threw a milkshake at us.”
Bradford & Bingley
Still, unruly hoodies successfully negotiated, Gaffey’s stock as a director has risen sufficiently to see him become the incumbent director on the last three Bradford & Bingley ads while at BJL, a notable fillip given the prestige of the account (prior to the building society’s recent troubles, at least) and the fact that the client was returning from a lengthy sabbatical from TV commercials. “To take Bradford & Bingley, an advertiser which hadn’t been on screen for about five or six years, and to help devise a campaign, a new identity for them, a new tone of voice, is something I’m really proud of. Of course, that’s developed over three commercials now. As far as scale goes, the size of the shoots, the locations, the number of background artists, and the choreography of all those elements, tied in with the specials effects work and live performance, it was a fantastic challenge.”
The timely B&B ads brought Gaffey to the attention of The Mob, just as the company was moving its northern headquarters from Leeds to Manchester this summer. “The Bradford & Bingley commercials are such beautifully crafted ads; they have everything: stunning visuals, excellent performance and they work as a message,” The Mob managing director, John Brocklehurst, said shortly after announcing Gaffey’s arrival in September.
Most people are apprehensive about how they’ll be portrayed when they are interviewed, and I suspect Gaffey is no different as The Drum exits stage left. When you go for any new job though, you rely on the character reference of your previous employer, so who better to give the last word to than Gaffey’s old boss, BJL managing director, Nicky Unsworth. “We were very supportive of the move,” she explains. “Chris has been a great member of the BJL team and we anticipate maintaining a strong ongoing relationship with him. We’ve always known directing is his first love. He is passionate about directing - but more importantly, he is good at it.”