The Call Sheet ~ VANDAL on why the best briefs leave room to experiment

The Call Sheet is Campaign Brief’s new Q&A series taking a closer look at the production companies behind Australia and New Zealand’s best commercial work. Next up is VANDAL.

Give us the elevator pitch – who are you and what do you do?

We’re VANDAL, an independent, hybrid creative and production studio in Redfern, Sydney (Gadigal Country). We work with agencies, brands and cultural institutions to make everything from campaigns, content, animation and VFX to experiences you can walk through and projections on the sails of the Opera House. If it goes on a screen or in a space, we do it.

You can come to us with a creative brief, a tricky production challenge or a “reckon we could…?” We’ll help work out what it could be, how to make it and which details will make audiences connect with it. We like getting involved early, when there’s room to experiment and find something nobody has quite pictured yet.

We’re a lean crew, which means we move fast, but we’ve been around the block enough times to know where the potholes are. We care about the process as much as the outcome, and have a ‘talented and nice’ ethos when it comes to both our own people and the people we try to work with.

What’s exciting you most about where the industry’s headed right now?

We’re excited by how much more room there is to experiment these days. When you can test an idea quickly, you can afford to follow the slightly odd thought, try a different approach and see whether there’s something in it. Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes that’s where the best work starts.

AI is part of that, but so is the way different creative disciplines are coming together. An animator, an artist and a creative technologist will look at the same brief quite differently. Get them talking and you can end up somewhere none of them would have reached alone.

For agencies and brands, that opens up some pretty interesting possibilities. We’d love to see more briefs where the ambition is clear but there’s still room to work out what form the idea should take. That’s an exciting conversation to be invited into.

How are you using AI or new technology to compete and create efficiencies?

We use AI every day at VANDAL. The useful question for us is where it earns its place in the job. Does it help us explore an idea, solve a production problem or save time on something repetitive? Great. Does it let us make something we couldn’t have made before, or take an idea further than we thought possible? That’s when it gets really interesting.

For a lean studio, the opportunity is to give people more time for the parts of the work that need their eye, experience and judgement. Testing a few more approaches or refining a detail. Getting further with the time and budget available.

We love a new toy as much as anyone, but it only becomes properly useful when we know when to reach for it.

How do you balance creative ambition with tightening budgets and timelines?

We like to get the budget and timing on the table early, while there’s still room to make good decisions. Knowing what we have to work with helps us put the effort where it will count.

Then we look at how we could make it. Could a different production approach give us more freedom? Could we build something once and use it across the campaign? Could a simpler execution actually make the idea stronger? Those are creative decisions as much as production ones.

Sometimes the numbers simply won’t stretch to everything, and we’ll say so. We’ll also come back with a way forward. The aim is to make sure everyone’s still excited about what we’re making after we’ve worked out how to make it happen.

What’s next for the company – growth, specialisation, or something else?

What’s next is building on the kind of studio VANDAL already is. Somewhere you can bring a brief or an idea before you know what to call it, and find people who are excited to work it out with you and make it the best thing that it possibly can be.

As the tools continue to evolve, the possibilities are expanding exponentially. That’s about as exciting as it gets for a bunch of curious makers like us. We love the thought that the next thing we make could be something none of us saw coming.

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