New Directors: Etienne & Julien-Pierre

Monsieur Monsieur: Tear The House Up

When it came to taking their first punt at directing, Fred & Farid creative team Etienne and Julien-Pierre wanted their project to come alive without any ‘barriers’. As keen gamers in tune with modern pop culture they found their desired freedom in the debauched and limitless world of action-adventure franchise Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

Having been assigned the brief for French dance music act Monsieur Monsieur’s remix of Zebra Katz’s track Tear The House Up, the creatives worked on the promo for five months around their roles at the Paris agency and the result is a four-and-a-half-minute bout of cool West Coast chaos in animated form.

“[Monsieur Monsieur] had wanted us to do something for them so we asked if they had a brutal and frenetic badass track to share,” state the pair. “We listened to them and settled on the remix of Zebra Katz’s track because it fit perfectly with what we had in mind.”

Their idea is set in the fictional city of Los Santos, a virtual habitat based on Los Angeles which has become synonymous with the look and feel of the GTA gaming world. Introducing a typically reckless rock’n’roll-type character and following an ever so familiar law-breaking decline throughout, the story takes the viewer on the ultimate fantasy thrill ride with Trevor, the protagonist.

“We follow the craziest character of GTA having a late night drink in a strip club,” describe the duo, who are unsigned as directors. “Our hero gets kicked out of the club and finds himself drunk in his underwear at midday before getting into an epic police chase.”

The high level of storytelling of the hit title has impressed the creatives and they’ve spent time playing almost all of its iterations over the years, labelling it a “creativity catalyser which every creative should play”.

The chance to break free from the confines of the agency and client world, transitioning to the virtual realm, wasn’t the only appeal of the job; their budget was non-existent and the chance to utilise GTA’s video editing feature and hijack the game as a form of new media allowed them to make a movie with “crazy production values without spending a dollar”.

Don’t think that it was any less work though, as the pair makes it clear that they still had to take the same approach as they would with a live-action agency shoot.

“We had exactly the same modus operandi as with a live shoot,” they confirm. “We defined our story, chose our locations, made a character and objects casting, chose our weather, shoot rates, angles, everything. The pre-production was what we’re used to.”

And despite the video being made with game footage, the aim was to try to make people forget about the GTA factor, which, with so many fan-made videos out there, wasn’t easy.

“On one hand it’s easy to record and shoot game footage: there are thousands of machinima videos on YouTube. On the other hand, it’s very hard to bring up the cinematography level, and build up an interesting story without any downtime using the physics and locations that the game can offer,” they say.

The video has been well received on YouTube and with this unique directing experience under their collective belt, the creatives believe that their agency careers can only help in creating more of the same: “Working as creatives is the best way to stay in the creative effervescence and learn from some of the huge directors we collaborate with on beautiful brands.”