London focus: Siri's Surprise Switch

It’s not easy keeping up with the career path of Siri Bunford. Though now a highly talented and successful commercials director at Knucklehead in London, Bunford’s journey there wasn’t exactly a standard one.

Born in Wales to opera-singing parents, Bunford was “incredibly shy and a real goodie-two-shoes who was very studious”, and though she had a very creative upbringing, she initially had no interest in advertising or directing at all. Writing was her first passion. She would enter, and win, poetry competitions at school, but her shyness made the reading out of the winning poem a hateful experience.

She needed to overcome that shyness, though, because her ambition was to be a journalist. One sure way of doing that was to step in front of the camera – or in this case the microphone – which is exactly what Bunford did. She moved to France for a year prior to university to work at a French radio station. When the station manager asked if she would like to be their on-air weather reporter, she agreed. Shyness cured, Bunford headed back to the UK to study English Literature (alongside Adam & Eve’s Ben Priest, interviewed on page 60), after which she went for an interview at the BBC in Cardiff. “It was all going brilliantly,” she explains, “until they asked me how I would go about securing an exclusive, and I said I was completely against the notion of door-stopping strangers, especially if they were the victims. They told me there and then I wasn’t aggressive enough to be a hack.”

Through Kubrick’s eyes

Undeterred, Bunford moved to London, where she worked for Elle magazine – “writing the stuff at the back nobody reads” – before moving on to work as a promo maker for movie channel TCM, which had just launched in the UK. “I started there the same week as [HLA director] Simon Ratigan,” she says, “and a week before Brett Foraker.” It was at TCM that Bunford learned to edit and where her visual self-expression came to the fore. In 2000, after some freelance stints at places such as the Discovery Channel, she moved to join Channel 4 as a promo director, where she would write, direct and edit a plethora of programme trails and idents over the course of the next 10 years.

Bunford cherishes her time at Channel 4 as she was given a huge amount of creative freedom there by Brett Foraker – who was by then the Channel’s creative director – and was allowed to explore ideas without too much interference. “It was a very steep learning curve,” she says, “but a really good training ground and a brilliant experience.” Among the work she produced at Channel 4 was the fantastic promo for The F Word, in which Gordon Ramsay destroyed various foodstuffs with a baseball bat, but the spot that seemed to propel Bunford into the industry’s consciousness was her directorial effort for More4’s Stanley Kubrick Season. Employing a 60-second tracking POV shot, the spot lets us see through the eyes of the eponymous director as he walks to his chair on the set of The Shining. “I had actually shot something just before that,” recalls Bunford, “about China’s stolen children that I was really happy with, but yeah, I guess the Kubrick spot became more of a ‘dining out’ moment for me.”

Bunford signed to Knucklehead in 2009 while still at Channel 4, but left the channel completely two years ago to concentrate on her commercials career. She is aware that her eclectic career trajectory and unplanned journey into directing is unusual, and states that she is jealous of people who have clear plans and a specific career path, because she readily admits to not looking to the future too much herself. “I look at someone like [fellow Knucklehead director] Chris Hewitt, who is 27 or something, and he is very ambitious and very clear-minded, and I really envy that,” Bunford states. Her strength, it seems, is in her conviction in and planning for the present. When she is working on a project she works tirelessly to make it perfect and is tenacious about every aspect of the shoot going exactly to plan. “I am very clear-sighted about it,” she says. “I will really throw myself into it and become obsessed about the moment I am in or the thing I am doing. But I don’t really think about the future beyond that too much, I just think about the job at hand and not worry too much about where I am going.”

Knucklehead or nothing

That’s not always the case, though, because Bunford really only wanted to sign for Knucklehead, even when other firm offers were on the table. She tried to be subtle at first, asking mutual acquaintances to introduce her to the team at Knucklehead, but when that didn’t work she tried another approach. “In the end,” she says, “I didn’t bother calling, I just door-stopped them for an interview.”