Special Problems: Talent x 2

From the relative obscurity of New Zealand, directing-and-beyond duo Special Problems have used their multifaceted talents in design, live direction, animation and effects to rocket both themselves and their promo clients – including teenage sensation Lorde – to global stardom. David Knight meets the Kiwi directors as they announce a split that could let them soar even higher.

Over the past six years, the directing collective known as Special Problems has forged an enviable reputation for being able to turn their hands to all sorts of creative work – from design to direction, from straight-ahead cinematic filmmaking to abstract animation.

From their comparatively remote base in New Zealand, the Auckland-based duo of Campbell Hooper and Joel Kefali – along with a fluctuating body of colleagues and helpers – has managed to make a global impact. Their video for NZ band The Naked And Famous’ Young Blood in 2010 introduced the group to a worldwide audience, and the vibrancy of the vignette style – with young people doing cool and dangerous things in some spectacular exterior locations – has been an influence on numerous videos and ads ever since.

Naturalism and artifice

Special Problems’ music video output – they’ve created promos for a range of leftfield rock, pop and dance artists such as Tame Impala, Flying Lotus and The Presets – showcases an eclectic clash between naturalism and artifice, live action and design-led graphics, bound up by experimental 3D animation.

But their repertoire isn’t limited to promos. They’ve moved into mainstream commercials with a client list featuring HP, Ford and Cadbury. The pair have also branched out into narrative filmmaking, with a brace of short films. In effect, Special Problems has become a self-sufficient, one-stop shop for versatile creativity.

But now, the integrity of that unit is changing. For the past few months, Hooper and Kefali have been directing under their own names. This move came about just as Kefali finished working on what was to be their most successful music video ever.

Earlier this year, when he started talking to a young female singer-songwriter about her debut music video, Kefali had no idea it would turn into one of the biggest global pop hits of 2013. But the singer was Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor – otherwise known as Lorde – and the song was Royals. The promo also happened to be Kefali’s first solo directing job without his partner.

“There was always a sense of anticipation about Royals, and they thought it was going to be something big,” says Kefali, from his home in Auckland. “But I don’t think anyone had an idea that it was going to be Number 1 in the UK, and Number 1 in the US for more than six weeks.”

He adds that pre-production meetings with Lorde would usually take place after the then 16 year old had finished school for the day, still in her uniform. Further evidence that this is not your mainstream popstar can be seen in the video itself – close-ups of the young performer are intercut with impressionistic takes on the lives of street-cast Auckland teenagers. Lorde’s US label requested a more performance-based cut, but that didn’t prevent the original becoming a major YouTube hit.

The experience took Kefali back to a pre-Special Problems era. “We were shooting in locations that were personal to me or to Lorde. That video was as much about the landscape as it was about the characters. It was going back to imagery and subject matter that I had a personal interest in – going back to before that mode of collective thinking of Special Problems.”

Meanwhile, Cam Hooper was also working on his first solo music video, for The Naked And Famous’ Hearts Like Ours. Creating this atmospheric and enigmatic promo – a series of brooding portraits with a weird, dreamlike quality – gave Hooper a similarly new experience.

“Usually when we’re working together we would sit down, have a beer, talk about it and build on it – you iron out each other’s blind spots very quickly,” he explains in shots’ three-way Skype conversation with the pair in Auckland. “In a way, I went back with Hearts Like Ours. It took me a long time to come up with the idea and, because I didn’t have someone to talk to about it, I left a little bit more of an unconscious process in there.”

Special Problems are certainly moving into new territory. They’ve downsized their Auckland studio – at least partly due to some trusted colleagues leaving the fold – and have signed with The Sweet Shop for global representation. But this progression from collective to a more conventional set-up has not come out of the blue.

“Early on, everything was very integrated. All the team were on all jobs,” Kefali recalls. “But then we became so busy we had to tag-team.” In other words, one of the pair has been taking charge on specific jobs for a while.

“The fact is, we don’t just turn up to direct and then fuck off again. We edit our own stuff and do the post on our own work,” adds Hooper. “So there was a lot of overlapping going on. I’d be finishing an edit and Joel would be going over to Melbourne to start prepping another job.”

Together and alone

The partnership started when the pair met in the mid-2000s: Kefali, from Auckland, came from a fine art background; Hooper, “from a sawmilling family in the middle of nowhere”, was into photography; Kefali knew about animation and motion effects, Hooper did not; their mutual passion, and talent, was for design.

In 2007, Kefali had quit a job working as a motion-graphics designer and had moved into Hooper’s studio space while he was away travelling. “Cam came back to Auckland and suggested that, as we were doing similar kinds of work, that we put it together. But there wasn’t some massive grand plan. We were working on instincts and intuition.”

“What was different about Special Problems from the start, and informed our style of directing, is that we were never really out to be just directors,” adds Hooper. “We did a lot of album covers and fashion stuff – probably half of what we did in the first year or two was design work.”

(As for the name, Hooper reveals that Special Problems came from an old book on special effects and techniques in photography he saw on a friend’s bookshelf. “The words had a nice dichotomy. It kind of rang.”)

Being in New Zealand also meant that Special Problems could benefit from the country’s pioneering NZ On Air scheme that helps fund music videos for local bands. They found a steady stream of work, with budgets just big enough to make something, but having to shoot and post everything themselves. “We slowly learned our craft and that was vital,” says Hooper.

Their video for track Degrees Of Existence by Kiwi alt-rock band Dimmer – featuring four slackers repeating the same routine in an ultra-cool version of Groundhog Day – was the first to get them attention outside New Zealand. It was quickly followed by a bravura combination of hand-drawn and stop-frame animation for Australian psychedelic rockers Tame Impala’s Half Full Glass Of Wine. And to emphasise their versatility, one of their next projects was a wildly imaginative video for MmmHmm by LA electronic genius Flying Lotus. Featuring a ‘plantwoman’ in space surrounded by astral fragments, the promo blended different grades of 3D animation with live action.

By this point, Special Problems had established a rapport with local alt-pop outfit The Naked And Famous, working with them on other aspects of their visual branding even before they made their first video for the band. “Our career grew alongside theirs in a sense,” notes Kefali. “We did their EP artwork before they’d even played a gig.”

Stretching the budget

Their experience in making do with small budgets paid off in the video for Young Blood, Hooper explains: “The music has a certain international feel, so it made sense to shoot it all over the world. But we couldn’t afford that, so we got a director friend in London, Dave Ma, one of our assistants who was in LA and a friend in Sydney to shoot stuff using the same camera and lenses. So it feels like it was shot everywhere, even though it was mostly shot in New Zealand.”

Special Problems have gone on, together and now individually, to make all the videos for The Naked And Famous as well as all of the artwork for the band’s records, tour posters and merchandise. Kefali explains just how close the relationship has become: “Our aesthetic became intrinsic to The Naked And Famous – they trust us to move them into new territory visually and not repeat ourselves.”

Shortly after making the Young Blood video, Special Problems’ commercials career began to take off, starting with their spot for HP, starring Alicia Keys discussing her version of hit Empire State Of Mind. With a combination of live action and hyperreal animation, the video was a more mainstream version of what Special Problems had done before.

The big-client commercial work has flowed in increasing volume ever since – alongside commissions for fashion promos for local designers such as Jessica McCormack and Lucas Hugh – demonstrating the sheer diversity of their work and their graphic versatility.

New Zealand state of mind

During the past year or so they’ve completed spots for Cadbury, Ford (featuring Australian singer John Farnham) and two rival Australian insurance giants, AAI and AMI. Which gives some indication why the pair, so well regarded in London, LA and elsewhere, have not considered leaving New Zealand for the northern hemisphere, like several of their contemporaries.

“In some ways we’ve found we were having more success on international work from down here,” says Hooper. “Part of the reason is that it’s so easy to make things here – you want to go shoot something, you just go do it.” Kefali adds his view: “To some extent, that geographical isolation is part of our style.”

The New Zealand Film Commission funded Hooper’s first (solo-directed) short film 43,000 Feet (2011). His visuals were matched to a sharp, darkly comic script about the thoughts that go through a statistician’s mind as he’s sucked out of a plane mid-flight in a freak accident. Realising he has several minutes before he hits the ground, he reflects on his past, formulates a plan for landing, and rehearses what he will say to the media on the off chance that he survives.

43,000 Feet was followed by another short last year, Echoes, co-directed by the pair. It was part of a series of five films made by five directors around the world, funded by Lexus and produced by Hollywood heavy-hitters The Weinstein Company.

Hooper describes their being contacted as “a random occurrence”. They were asked to turn around a script in 48 hours, in response to a brief around the idea that ‘Life is amazing’. Even though what they came up with was based around the cynical speech of a world-weary best man at a wedding, Lexus bought the script. The resulting film is an impressionistic montage of delicious images and brilliant camera-moves – with a happy ending.

“The Weinstein Company have a model about how they make their features and they applied that model in the way they made these short ?lms,” Hooper explains. “It was a great insight into how Hollywood works.” Echoes turned out to be one of the last things that the duo directed together – at least for now.

Separating to grow

If separation was the logical next step, due to the sheer demand for their talents, there is also the suggestion that the pair were feeling hemmed in by the collective responsibility of Special Problems. “We’d almost created a beast that was bigger than the two of us,” Kefali reflects. “We have been asked a lot to ‘make it look like Special Problems’. It got to a point where we thought: ‘Let’s develop as individuals.’”

Kefali recently directed a second video for The Naked And Famous – I Kill Giants – from the new album In Rolling Waves, as well as designing the artwork for the album. The video is an intense dance performance by two girls in front of an impassive audience.

“I wanted them to have an intense relationship with each other along the lines of Heavenly Creatures, and I also wanted their dance to take cues from notable dance-related scenes in ?lms and pop culture,” he says. He has also directed a second video for Lorde.

The promo for her second single Tennis Court is surprisingly minimal, with a fixed focus on the singer’s face throughout, using only lighting to create literal and emotional light and shade. Hooper, meanwhile, has been working on a video for US band Little Daylight, combining performance with 3D animation bursting through the figures – very Special Problems – and is about to shoot a spot for wireless internet company Ubiquity Systems, also in the States.

But what of the future of Special Problems as an entity? Does it actually still exist? Hooper and Kefali insist that it will continue, even if only in a slightly intangible form.

“Joel and I have been slowly developing an animated feature,” reveals Hooper. “Maybe we focus the name Special Problems just on that project? Who knows? We can go wherever we want. In the modern market of commercial production, de?nition is king – ‘that director does that thing and we want that thing so let’s get him’, but Special Problems is the antithesis of that. It’s the absence of de?nition that keeps it interesting. We prefer the shrug.”