Ruckus Films prove comedy is an art

Ruckus Films collected Silver in Cresta’s Moving Image category for their beautifully manicured spot for Manscaped. We talked to the director and Ruckus founder JJ Adler about the importance of telling potentially gross jokes in the most elegant and refined way.
 
"[The agency] came with a really strong concept, an Ai image of a guy with two miniature versions of himself that sold the campaign through to the client. My pitch back was to treat it in a really grounded way, so that this feels like an alternative universe, having me capturing this guy going about his day. Nothing should feel stylized about the way that it’s shot… like cinema-vérité, almost! It should just be pretty, it should feel effortless."
 
JJ Adler started Ruckus in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, "I just thought the world wasn’t chaotic enough, so I naively thought it would be fun to start a woman led comedy shop in the US!”. But ironically as a kid she never dreamed of being a director, “I thought I would be married and have five kids by the time I was 31 so I thought that would be my job. But life took a different turn, and I ended up in film school". Hired by the Onion News Network as an editor and post producer she was promoted to director by the launch of the project.
 
Where does she see the impact of a great production company? "I think people come to a particular production company mostly for the director, but in order for a good director to have the freedom to become great, they need an excellent support system. They need people who've found the most elegant, smartest, scrappiest way out of any problem that comes up on production. You need people who understand how to weave magic out of that chaos."
 
And what’s the unique Ruckus Films DNA? "I think we have a really down to earth ethos that works for a lot of people, especially in the comedy space. Our goal is to deliver high end polish… cinematic work but in just a really pretension free kind of way. I feel like a lot of a lot of companies take themselves very seriously. We take the work seriously, but not ourselves."
 
See the winning film here: https://tinyurl.com/bdfnej6w
 
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