Hotspur and Argyle

Hotspur & Argyle are delighted to announce the addition of the brilliant Jackie Oudney to our roster.

Jackie carved her niche as an outstanding performance director through her work on award winning features ‘Vagabond Shoes’ and ‘French Film’, and has garnered similar acclaim for her commercials work. From the unforgettable and multi award winning Bollocks viral for VW to her more recent work for clients such as Philips, Monarch, McDonalds, First Choice, Morrisons and Kingsmill, Jackie’s natural ability to capture and convey the subtleties of human interaction sets her firmly apart from the crowd.

Click the image above to view Jackie’s Reel.

This whistle-stop tour of contemporary Blackpool conducted by seven year old tour guide Oliver Nelson is Theo Delaney’s personal paean to Britain’s greatest seaside town. Featuring a host of attractions and an astoundingly assured performance by its young star, the film aims to reinvigorate the nation’s love of the Las Vegas of Lancashire. Scripted by TBWA Manchester’s Becci Tyrrell and Adam Richardson – who recently cleaned up at the Roses Awards – the commercial benefits from cinematography by Danny Cohen (The Kings Speech, Les Miserables etc) and editing by Scott Crane of The Quarry. TBWA’s producer was Rose Bulow and Victoria Lynn took charge for Hotspur & Argyle.

If you have an important message on a sensitive issue, say it with dildos. That’s the lesson learned from the story of David Kerr’s PSA for Evolve Inc which campaigns for greater responsibility among American gun owners. The film shows a couple of kids sword fighting with marital aids discovered in the family home while their embarrassed mothers look on. Evolve’s co-founder Rebecca Bond explains:  “Our PSA is humorous, but the message is serious. Parents need to take ownership of safety in the house. If you don’t want kids to play with it, put it away – it’s up to you to keep your stuff locked up. We’re using humor to cut through political correctness and deliver a simple message. Americans can have a serious conversation about firearm safety that doesn’t devolve into a political abyss.”  The film’s naturalistic performances are deftly handled to deliver maximum humour and resonance and at the time of writing it had achieved two and a half million youtube views in less than a week.  Shot in Los Angles with Hotspur & Argyle’s US partner company Private School Entertainment the idea came out of McCanns New York.

This beautiful film celebrating great goals from World Cups down the years is the work of the inimitable Richard Swarbrick and has been made to mark a special pop up fantasista exhibition hosted by our friends at The Assembly Rooms from Monday 23 June. The inaugural exhibition from fantasista, the football artists group, took place a year ago in Waterloo and this new compact show, specially mounted to coincide with events in Brazil, features work from Quiet British Accent, Dave Merrell, Ezequiel Suranyi, Haarala Hamilton and the aforementioned Mr Swarbrick.

The football obsessives here at Hotspur & Argyle are so excited by all this that they’ve decided to lay down this simple competition-challenge for fellow devotees of the beautiful game: can you name all the scorers in the film? If you can, drop us an email to worldcup@hotspurandargyle.co.uk. All the correct entries received by the closing date of July 14 (aka World Cup Final Day) will be placed in a hat and one lucky winner will receive a signed, one-off, super high quality Richard Swarbrick print. Listen carefully and you’ll find a couple of the answers in the soundtrack – as for the rest, good luck!

World Cup fever grips Hotspur & Argyle not least because of our contributions to the half time match breaks. Ogilvy’s emotive Coca Cola spot combines excerpts from previous football executions with new original footage from director Theo Delaney.

TBWA\Chiat\Day’s star studded Adidas spot directed by City Of God helmsman Fernando Meirelles features the likes of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez, Daniel Alves and music by Kanye West. We’re proud to say that the British leg of its epic shoot was a Hotspur & Argyle production.

Cult status surely beckons for Rune Milton’s new campaign for Global Connect – the cloud solutions company – and the head of IT who finds a kind of sublime inner peace by outsourcing all his technical problems. The campaign’s gentle pace and hyper-geek styling provide the perfect context for its hero’s antics, which include compiling mix tapes for the office disco and taking afternoon power naps with the chief exec. The three commercials were written by Rune and creative director Lars Busekist, Rune edited the films himself and the DP was regular collaborator Jacob Møller.

Click on the above image to view all three films.

A new Broadway Musical from Sting, The Last Ship, is to be launched with this elegant animated film from Blind. Presented with an open brief – akin to one for a music video – Blind’s objective was to tell a beautiful visual story that is emotionally tethered to the musical. After reading the play’s script, they developed a narrative about the father son relationship spanning multiple generations. The red ship is the visual thread connecting each scene and neatly linking back to the production’s logo.
The agency was SpotCo with creative from Stacey Lieberman Prince and Darren Cox and the agency producer was Tom Coppola. Music, unmistakably, came from Sting.

Click here to view the film.

BBC2’s ‘Inside No 9’, directed by David Kerr, is getting the kind of rave reviews not seen in TV comedy since the same director brought the multi award-winning ‘Fresh Meat’ into the world. Written by and starring the legendary Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton of ‘League Of Gentlemen’ fame, each of the six half hour films take place in a different house with number nine on its front door. ‘Finely crafted’ gush the Sunday Times, ‘magnificent’ says the Times, ‘wickedly funny’ enthuses the Observer, ‘deliciously dark’ effervesces the Mail On Sunday and ‘one of the TV highlights of the year’ eulogises Heat, giving it a maximum five stars. And the raving’s not confined to the press, none other than David Walliams has tweeted ‘this is the best TV show I have seen in ages…’ while Reece Shearsmith proclaims ‘the man responsible for making all our “No 9′s” is the wonderful @davidkerrtv… a joy to work with’. We humbly concur.

Huge excitement reigns here at Hotspur & Argyle with the arrival of brilliant Danish Director Rune Milton. Rune developed his considerable narrative skills as an editor at online agency Framfab before going on to produce and direct his own stuff and moving to award winning agency Stahl Hjaltelin as a creative director in 2006. He arrives in the UK with a range of great commercials for brands like Nike, Microsoft and Nescafe under his belt and his unique visual gifts and understated humour are already causing a stir in London.