Ad director Bryan Buckley debuts 'Asad'

by Hugh Hart

Director Bryan Buckley's "Asad," which follows two boys in Somalia, has been nominated for the Oscar for best live action short. Photo: Shortoftheweek.com

Short takes range from height of commercialism to depths of poverty

Every January for 10 years, director Bryan Buckley has obsessed over his Super Bowl commercials, and this year is no exception.

"It's down to the wire for Tide," he says.

Besides the detergent spot, Buckley's directorial touch will be seen in Best Buy and Coca-Cola ads during the big game next Sunday.

But this year people also can witness Buckley's storytelling skills on the big screen when his Oscar-nominated live-action short "Asad" plays theaters as part of the "Oscar Nominated Short Films 2012: Live Action" program.

The 18-minute "Asad" follows a young Somali refugee who embarks on a voyage to catch fish off the coast of Africa, but instead finds a boat plundered by pirates. Compared with his TV work, Buckley says, the film "seems like a whole different thing, but if it weren't for the commercial work, we wouldn't have discovered this world in the first place."

Buckley and producer Mino Jarjoura trace the evolution of "Asad" to a Microsoft assignment in Africa related to the company's Green Computing program. That project led to a U.N. documentary, "No Autographs," set in a refugee camp in Kenya.

"We kind of fell in love with all these bright, interesting people who were stuck there, and asked ourselves, 'What can we do to get this out into the world?' Buckley says. "That's how 'Asad' came about."

Cast exclusively with Somalian refugees, "Asad" stars two boys with no acting experience.
"We found out that our lead boys, Ali and Harun Mohammed, had never been to school. They couldn't read or write," Buckley says.

The brothers, then 16 and 10, also couldn't swim. Because the story involves rowboat misadventures, "swimming lessons every morning became this huge part of the process," Buckley says. Each afternoon, a tutor taught the boys their dialogue. "They had to memorize the script one page at a time," Buckley says. "It was intense."

While "Asad" captures the gritty routine of a disenfranchised community, Buckley used a light touch.
"I thought it was important to wire in this idea of humor and humanity," he says, "because it allows people to connect to their plight versus being too heavy handed."

Foo Fighter tells story in L.A.'s 'Sound City'

After its Sundance Film Festival launch, Foo Fighters guitarist-turned-filmmaker Dave Grohl's first documentary, "Sound City," opens Thursday at the Roxie. The documentary focuses on a Los Angeles recording studio that served as a home away from home for three decades' worth of A-list rock talent.
In the film, Grohl, who has decried the excesses of digitized music making, records an album at Sound City on tape, the old-fashioned way. The movie includes appearances by Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor and Paul McCartney.

Re-creating New York City in San Francisco

Moviegoers who watch "The Avengers" may think they're looking at New York during the film's climactic battle scene. In fact, Industrial Light & Magic VFX supervisor Jeff White explains that the superhero movie, nominated for an Oscar for achievement in visual effects, features a computer-generated version of Manhattan that was digitally constructed in the company's Presidio headquarters.

"We spent about six weeks in New York photographing every 100 feet on the ground, in a crane and from building rooftops," White says. "We collected over 1,800 spheres to create this area within New York. It's much like Google street view, where you get a full 360 degrees, except ours is very high resolution. We used that as the basis for building the city."

White and his colleagues also replaced trees, hot dog stands and people with digital stand-ins. And for the office interiors seen in skyscrapers that whisk by as Iron Man flies down the street, the VFX team looked close to home, White says. "We shot about 20 room interiors here at work, and then used those to populate all of New York City. If you zoom in on the Blu-ray version of 'The Avengers,' those are ILM offices in all the buildings." {sbox}

Hugh Hart is a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent. E-mail: sadolphson@sfchronicle.com

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