Lots of advertising agencies say they make short films. Often, those short films are just ads by another name—more artful ads, perhaps, but ads all the same.
Social content shop Portal A isn’t one of those agencies. This year, Portal A has been on the film-festival circuit with its first narrative short film, Five Star, directed by Kai Hasson, the agency’s creative director and one of its co-founders. After premiering at the RiverRun International Film Festival earlier this spring, the short, a 14-minute comedy-horror starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, nabbed the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Short Film at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it has continued its run at festivals like the LA Shorts International Film Festival and the Asian American International Film Festival.
Five Star isn’t a secret ad. It’s a narrative effort that’s the latest project to come out of an internal program designed to get Portal A back to its creative roots of making “weird stuff on the internet,” Jacob Motz, the agency’s director of original projects, told Marketing Brew.
“Two or three years ago, I remember we were sitting around, and the partners were like, ‘We want to just kind of give ourselves the ability to make stuff without worrying about gatekeepers, for the sake of creativity, for the sake of innovation,’” Motz said. “We want to be able to always take risks with the content we’re making online, so we need to have a program that allows us to do that.”
Shoot for the moon
To do it, in February 2023, the agency rolled out Moonshots, a creative research and development lab funded by the company with the goal of distributing creative projects regularly. Five Star is its first narrative short film, although Hasson and several Portal A employees previously worked on another short film, Robu, in 2019, before Moonshots was established. Other Moonshots projects have included More than Half, a documentary about identity, and “Fit Check,” a social series that takes an anthropological look at fashion.
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Portal A is one of a number of agencies getting involved in indie production as a way to carve out some creative freedom in the industry. Others, like SRH, Six+One, and Revery, have dabbled in indie movies and documentaries, endeavors that they believe will help them experiment and stretch creatively, AdAge reported in August.
As for Portal A, “the value that we’re getting from this isn’t monetary,” Motz said. “There’s a lot of things we look at as real value. There’s culture internally at the company. People internally at the company go like, ‘Wow, we’re really, we’re taking money, and we’re putting it in creative endeavors for creative sake, and that’s fun and cool.’ And we’re also including everybody at the company to take part in it. So it becomes highly creative projects that people get to go on little adventures with.”
At the same time, having narrative short films under an agency’s belt could also come in handy when pitching marketers. As Marketing Brew has reported, brands like Bilt, Tower 28, Oatly, and Bratz are all creating their own short scripted projects for their social channels.
“More than ever, being able to sharpen your craft and be able to tell stories in a short-form way is where the future is headed regardless,” Motz said. “In 10 years, I feel like the vast majority of people are going to be experiencing scripted in shorter formats.”