Luis Peña
"I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, which wasn’t a pretty place looking back on it now. I knew early on, that I didn’t really fit with things there. While everybody else was out playing football, I was drawing. What I do remember is being outside all of the time and just creating things to amuse myself."
"Even at college, I spent a load of time pushing myself creatively. I was studying the advertising program at Austin, when I heard that the student body needed some help with design. We were basically doing the promotions stuff for guest speakers when they came to campus: posters, t-shirts and that sort of thing. That turned out to be one of the most important influences on my life. The guys running the department were totally wild and from the architecture school of all things."
"These guys were seriously into doing weird shit with Macromedia; which was truly amazing. The Architectural School at Austin had this incredible computer lab, which we didn’t have in advertising. So I remember asking the dean of the architectural school if I could use his lab for projects. Amazingly he agreed."
"In that creative lab, we really started to do some seriously crazy work. The sort of stuff no one had ever seen before. It was so exciting and so cutting edge that the university didn’t know what to think of us. Breaking the mold and being highly experimental was exhilarating. But it soon became a huge problem when I bought all of this experimental stuff into my advertising program. The lecturers weren’t into it at all! In fact, they looked at failing me once if it hadn’t been for the dean of my faculty."
"Dr. John Murphy is one of my favorite people on the planet. He could see what I was doing and he tried to protect me and encouraged me to push boundaries even further. I remember in my final year we had to present our final work on boards, which were then critiqued by the guys from Leo Burnett. I did all of my work as a video on a computer screen!"
"I was the first student ever to do this at Austin and the lecturers wanted to fail me immediately. Fortunately the Burnetts guys were all over it though, because they could see the future coming in this sort of work. I think my self confidence actually comes from breaking boundaries like this. Certainly having the Dean’s support really encourage me to go for it at times."
"After we graduated, most of my friends headed for the ad scene of New York. Again, I did the opposite and wanted to go to San Francisco were all of the innovation was happening at the time. Adobe was starting to change the face of things and I just loved the vibe coming out of that city. There was some really cool emerging design and art direction happening, and I wanted to be a part of all that."
"However, when I got to San Francisco there was a recession on and things were not as I expected. After my money ran out in the first fortnight, I was pretty much homeless living out of hostels, the YMCA and some seriously shitty hotels. It was looking pretty bad until I met Ronny Knight, a talented young photographer. We managed to share our limited resources and got a cheap place to live."
"I had been showing my book all over town when Carson Taylor from Katson & Loeb called me up. The deal was that I was to work for a day, so they could check me out. It was all going fine, until they got me to do the mechanicals for the ad I was working on. I didn’t know anything about doing production, so I totally stuffed it up and misspelt a word for good luck! Pretty bad outcome given I was pretty much starving at this time."
"My confidence was totally shot to bits, when Carson called me back and gave me a job at K&L. This guy turned out to be one of the greatest mentors any art director could get in life. He was totally into things and just knew the game back to front. He came out of Chiat Day and was unique in the San Francisco ad scene."
"Carson was 6.5’, tough and handsome and rode around on a Harley. One day he takes me out for another lesson in advertising and says he his going to teach me about the essence of beauty. We were doing a lot of campaigns directed at women and I guess he figured I wasn’t sensitive enough. Carson took me to a florist and had them teach me the art of floral arrangement. He had mastered the skill himself and found it helped him to be better at what we did for a living."
"So here I was, a young art director being trained in the finer arts of floral arrangements, courtesy of my creative director! You can learn a lot from these things if you are creative. For me, I learnt how to be far more delicate with the way that I approached my work."
"It’s funny the things that you can learn from people, when you want to. Mike Shine, one of the founders of BSSP is this incredibly special soul. I could talk about this guy for days. Anyway, he is another one of those people who goes out to master a new skill all of the time."
"Mike got into woodworking. I saw something special in what he was doing and soon fell in love with this craft myself. I was inspired to make furniture. From cutting down the tree, to planing the wood and then making something without screws, seemed like an art worth learning. You can see that I’ve learnt some amazing things from some really incredible people over the years."
"I had been working with K&L for about two years when an old college friend working at Y&R New York, offered me a job. They were doing some really cool work and were looking for new talent. So I left K&L and rushed to NYC. I lasted only 5 months at best. It nearly killed me to travel an hour on the train just to get out to do some rock climbing on the weekends."
"However, we did some amazing work for the Bronx Zoo and picked up some awards for the agency. But New York took an immediate toll on my soul. It wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I ended up dumping half my possessions on the sidewalk and leaving the city one day."
"There is this story at Y&R, where the President was raving about the creative work they were doing. As he turned around to make special mention of our campaign work, my old partner was laughing because I was gone, headed for Wyoming!"
"When I got back to San Francisco (via Wyoming), I decided that I wanted to be a graphic designer instead of an art director. Things were kind of in reverse, I know. But my logic was that I could take more creative control if it was my design from start to finish."
"Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners hired me to help with a client looking for a new design direction. Before long I was rebranding all of their POS, packaging - basically designing everything. I was really into collage at the time, so I would do all of their sales posters as if they were masterpieces. John Butler at BSSP said to me one day ‘that I could turn shit into gold!’ Which was one of the nicest accolades I have ever been paid."
"I guess that became my thing. No matter how shitty the task, I would make it my own creatively and make it special. It was while I was working as a designer that the internet became more powerful in terms of what you do with it. I figured that this was the future of things to come, so I quit BSSP and started to learn how to code."
"I like to understand things at a core level so that I can know what is creatively possible. If you know how to break things, then you can push boundaries to the next level. This was a really exciting time for me, and before long BSSP had me back and running their interactive business for several years. This was so cool, because I had the freedom to do things that had never been done before."
"It was during this time that my path eventually brought me to filmmaking. What I could see back in 2010, was the rise of the 2min video and I really wanted to be part of that. Back when I was 25 years old, you couldn’t even dream of getting into filmmaking. But these days with the democratization of video, and all of these cool cameras, you can create something very special when you are just 25!"
"It was a natural process for me to go from interactive and flash sites to video. However, it’s one thing to be around TVC production all of your career, to then going to the technicalities of filmmaking. That is one big challenge to understand the technicalities of these things. But in a way, that is ‘the great attraction’ to filmmaking and learning all of the black arts that goes into making a great film."
"About this time, we had our first child and I really wanted to work from my home studio. I teamed up with Matt Ashworth as my writer and soon started freelancing for all of the big agencies in America, and some across the world too! It was an insanely busy time of life, where we pretty much worked all day and all night on multiple projects."
"Venebles Bell was one of the agencies I had been freelancing for. They were about to do this massive global launch of the Intel brand and asked me to work on it for them. The catch - was that I had to go on staff. This was my first major global launch, so it was an incredibly exciting opportunity. They are such an awesome agency and the guys are so totally cool and seriously creative."
"The campaign was a huge success and everything looked fantastic, but I found not having a black abyss under me disturbing. The funny thing is, that being freelance makes you work off the fear of failure. You have to be at the top of your game, everyday to survive. Being back in a full time gig with my own office was becoming too comfortable. I soon discovered that I needed the fear of the unknown to do my best work."
"It was a really weird conversation I had with the guys. I basically had to be honest and let them know that I needed to be independent and to embrace the uncertainties in my life."
"I guess the truth of it was, that I really wanted to put the hammer down and try to learn more about my style of filmmaking. I really love this work and have been totally hooked since my first documentary, ‘Grace and Mercy’. I can honestly say that I have never been in love with what I am doing, as much, as I am with my filmmaking."