Here’s “technically” my directorial debut, an intro film for the 2004 AIGA Las Vegas Work Show. I created the theme and collateral for that year’s awards show (and the one before) and had come up with a “Obey. Submit. Release.” tagline which basically meant to obey the client, submit your work and then come and party, obviously with very sexual overtones. The invitations and various collateral featured handcuffs and ball gags. There were two main images for the show: one where a man is kneeling, submissive – his hands bound by a computer mouse cable – beneath a dominatrix with a computer monitor for a head; the other where he had been released and was reaching up to grab a floating black cube the dominatrix was holding, which was, of course, what the awards looked like. So this short film was intended to explain where this dominatrix came from. Mixing parts of Alien, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell and a nice dash of David Lynch, I wrote and directed this with eatdrink handling the camera, edit and CGI. Francis George was gracious enough to loan his studio for the day and his skill with the lights.

It was, I thought, a pretty damn good campaign, but, unfortunately, it didn’t get any praise. Whatever.