Interviewing Chloe and Darren from ANDREA•GWYNN
I find myself in a Woodstock studio with Chloe Andrea and Darren Gwynn from ANDREA•GWYNN
I ask them all about their company, creative ideas, inspiration, outlooks on the creative industry and views on Cape Town World Design Capital 2014.
Watch the most remarkable video where creative meets commercial in the AngloGold Ashanti AuDitions 2013 | 2014 Fashion Film by ANDREA•GWYNN below.
Q: So you’re a co-directing stills/film company known as ANDREA•GWYNN, tell the average Joe what this means and entails.
D: Our company provides a full service from original concept to final product. We challenge brands to take a chance and work with them in creating something that is conceptually relevant and forward thinking.
C: We’ve built a really solid group of people around us with whom we work alongside in all of these areas namely music producers, cinematographers and editors to name a few.
What we essentially do in a nutshell is cater for and
produce content for the online era.
We are very aware of where technology is heading at the moment and remain the pioneering house for this content.
D: Back in high school my girlfriend at the time was doing photography and I ended up in the dark room with her.
[We laugh.]She showed me a photograph that she was busy developing and it was the most magical thing that I had ever seen. I fell in love with photography that day.
Nowadays with digital it takes 8 hours to produce an editorial of 6 pages that can be seen through one finger swipe on an I-pad.
Content is very limited and very quick and people want content fast. Because the world is progressing so quickly, Chloe and I have found that with our films, fashion films and documentaries we are able to offer something that carries a lot more content for longer, keeping the viewer more engaged and the traffic through a site becomes so much better.
Q: How long have you worked together as ANDREA•GWYNN?
C: Darren and I have worked together on a number of projects until one day Darren wrote our surnames together on a piece of paper; ANDREA•GWYNN. I remember it was black on white and there was this dot in between the names. I saw something there. It felt like magic. Like seeing the blue flame on a fire and so we stared working together in December 2013.
D: We have always been working as ANDREA•GWYNN, we just didn’t put a title to it. I was a photographer and Chloe was a stylist.
C: Yet I was never just a stylist and Darren was never just a photographer.
D: When we worked together we crossed the threshold. Chloe would sometimes tell me on set, “What if you shot it from this side?” and I wouldn’t be offended. I would also sometimes say, “What if you styled it this way?” and she wouldn’t be offended. There were no egos to be bruised. We just got along creatively. So there was always an Andrea Gwynn element, we’ve just decided to start a company now.
Q: Tell us about your biggest campaign so far.
C: We were very privileged to shoot Auditions 2014 for Anglo Gold Ashanti and what an inspiring project that was. It was interesting because, a mining company wanted us to produce a fashion film for them which is unusual, and it’s this type of thinking that ANDREA•GWYNN admire. It was wonderful seeing one of the biggest mining companies in the world putting money into the creative industry, something this country needs more than anything.
The AngloGold Ashanti 2014 Fashion Film by ANDREA•GWYNN:
Q: Some say that you are “pushing boundaries” in the creative industry, is this so?
D: We believe we do. If we can have the owner and CEO of one of the biggest mining companies in the world tell us that their miners, who are in the rubble everyday digging for gold underground, started crying when they saw the fashion film that we created.
We are pushing boundaries.
C: If you don’t challenge yourself, how are you meant to grow? We challenge ourselves everyday and in doing so, extend that to other people to do the same in this industry.
D: A great author once said, “You learn facts in school, the more facts you can memorise the better at school you are”. I think that the same applies to life. Instead of knowing the facts, understanding them and carrying on with our lives, we question why.
Q: How do you feel about Cape Town being World Design Capital 2014?
D: As I’ve been lucky enough to see a large amount of this planet, there is no better feeling than flying into Cape Town and getting butterflies in your stomach and a lump in your throat when you see Table Mountain, it’s mental, I don’t know how to describe it.
C: There’s magic in Table mountain.
D: This city is one of the most beautiful cities that I have ever seen out of Paris, Milan, New York, London, LA, Barcelona… I can carry on.
C: And that’s big for him to say because he has worked with people like Heidi Klum, Daniel Craig and Al Pacino in a vast amount of cities.
D: Yes, you’re flying to Madrid to shoot Christiano Ronaldo flying back to London to shoot The Rolling Stones and then you’re off to New York to shoot Heidi Klum and it’s a great lifestyle, but I can honestly tell you that the mountain and the sea kills that by far. In saying that, I wish that our industry would fight more for better jobs and more employment.
D: Chloe and I love reading Time Magazine and recently there was an article on how 25 or 30 students over the past 20 years that have come out of the Los Angeles Institute of Arts have raised over 28 billion dollars for the creative industry. That money grows market place, which leads to more jobs and more gaffers on set and more directors and gives people more opportunities.
The sad thing now is that because our market place is being strangled and bullied, people want things for free, people want things done cheaply and it is not creating employment, in actual fact, it is killing the industry.
C: But yes, we are very happy that Cape Town is the World Design Capital 2014 and we hope that all the attention on this city will bring a lot of tourism and money into our industry and we will see growth. It’s a very exciting time.
Q: The World Design Capital is a city promotion project that celebrates the merits of design. Do you see your projects as tools to improve the social, cultural or economic life of the city?
D: Definitely. Especially with a project like Anglo Gold Ashanti who gives gold to jewellery designers, pushes and inspires them to produce and all of this goes back into the market place and grows the industry. As for our films and stills, when we have a billboard on the side of the road and we have a fresh student looking at it as a reference for something, we’re inspiring people and we think that’s important.
Q: Describe your duo with 5 words.
D: With Chloe and I there is a lot of banter and arguing and playfulness and shouting, but after all of that, we always end up agreeing with something incredible and it’s like, “Wow, we did that.”
C: Tailored.
D: Professional.
C: Honest.
D: Crazy.
C: Offbeat.
Q: Where do you see ANDREA•GWYNN in 5 years?
D: Chloe and I have a lot of big plans for our company, firstly moving into our own studio and offering everything under one house. We’ve been speaking to a lot of companies overseas and there’s definitely a lot of branching out on the horizon. I don’t want to give too much away but we definitely want to start working and collaborating with more people in different fields.
Often the people who dream of changing the world are the ones who actually do it and I believe that we are building a team like that.
C: Yes, from our music producer to our retoucher; everyone will jump off a bridge with us and take a chance.
Q: What is your advice to young aspiring creatives?
C: Assist as much as you can.
D: Yes. Assist. Don’t be scared. Take a chance. Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re wrong. Listen to people and take constructive criticism. Don’t let it get to your head. Stay humble. Love what you do. Share what other people is doing.
C: Staying humble is very important and that’s it: Share. Get rid of the mentality that there is this elitist competition, just share.
The more we share the more we’ll grow.
D: If someone does something cool, don’t sit there and criticize. Share it and tell people that someone is doing something cool.
Q: Do you have a motto or favourite quote?
D: Yes we do actually.
C: “It’s all about the picture.”
D: You know if you walk down the road and you walk into a market and one man was selling a Kingklip and another man was selling pixels on a screen and the other man was selling fridges, that is their product. They take care in making that product. They love everything about that product because they have taken their time away from their family and friends to make that.
Chloe and I work countless hours, we live our work.
When we hand our client a digital file that has our photographs of films on it; all of those hours of pre-production and planning and shooting and post-production and hard work and labour, it all comes down to that… the picture.
Interview conducted by Ed Beukes | Read more about his Behind the Scenes Experience at the Design Indaba for AngloGold Ashanti AuDitions 2013 | 2014 on his blog | Editor in Love
Images by ANDREA•GWYNN