This is a big story. For one thing, the aspect ratio for the featured project is 6000×1000. For another, it takes place in Texas. But, perhaps, the biggest thing about this story is the wide open mind of filmmaker Adam Taylor, a relative newcomer to the spot industry, who seamlessly transports the audience to the location of his choice. For the recent sales kickoff summit of Insperity, for example, Taylor shot in 8K with a Cooke anamorphic lens and took an assemblage of human resource professionals on a dramatic orchestral maneuver, from booming concert hall to a conference room, filling every inch of a 120-foot screen.
Taylor, whose website describes him as a “free range content creator,” formed his passion for filmmaking as a teen, when he talked his way into a job at Title Wave Video, a local mom and pop video rental shop in Houston. “I learned to love movies and the lost art of counting back change,” he mused. “I delivered my senior thesis on VHS and made some really bad student films.” Taylor’s work improved over time. His wife, photographer Trish Taylor, was shooting a good amount of commercial work in and around Houston. “During the digital revolution, we decided to network with the local crew and started producing TV and corporate films for our existing commercial clients,” he recalled. Taylor also looked to directors he admired, including Jordan Brady, whose RESPECT THE PROCESS podcast he follows. “Being dialed into Jordan created a crack in the wall between me and the work I wanted to be doing,” said Taylor, who attended the director’s first Commercial Directing Bootcamp, in Los Angeles, and was so impressed he attended Brady’s session in Dallas. “I am always looking to the next level of filmmakers, honing my craft, learning and trying to grow.”
Grow, he has, securing directing assignments for a range of clients, including Quarem, Emergicare, Halliburton, and, of course, Insperity. So pleased was the latter with Taylor’s “big screen” debut, the client decided to broadcast another of the director’s Insperity commercials – a :30 branding spot – nationally.
It is fitting that the sales kickoff video segues from the orchestral to the personal, because Taylor’s work for Insperity is ultimately about people. For the same client, he directed “The Fund,” a longform piece exploring Insperity’s social action network for employees. The video goes beyond testimonials, tapping into raw emotion to convey the ways in which the company earns its internal mott, “OneInsperity.”
Humor also finds it way into Taylor’s repertoire. For Quarem, a pioneer in lease administration software for commercial real estate companies, he directed “We Want It All,” a film noir spoof that proves you don’t need Martin Scorsese’s Rolodex to cast a mob movie. “To have some laughs with a genre, the key is not bells and whistles, it’s affection for the source material,” Taylor observed. “If you loved Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, it isn’t a huge leap to Abbott & Costello.”
To view Adam Taylor’s showreel, and for additional info, visit: https://www.adamtaylordirector.com/
