Sam Stuchbury
Motion Sickness
Sam has never liked convention and his mum thought he was a kid that asked a lot of questions. That inqusitive spirit has seen his and Hilary’s studio grow from 3 teenagers in a Dunedin loft to a global award winning studio that has kept it’s rebellious cheeky edge.
We chat taste, defiance, naivety, hustle and following your gut all the way through.
My grandma had loads of copies of the classic Beano annuals, and I was obsessed with cartoons and wanted to be a cartoonist. I had a book that showed you how to draw Homer Simpson, like the head and the three little bits of hair, and I was fascinated that you could follow instructions and end up drawing something great in the end.
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My mum still says she doesn’t know where my creativity comes from. She worked at a London regional council in the canteen, became a chef, and now teaches hospitality, and my dad was an electrician and metal-worker in the building industry, so nothing really in a truly creative design field.
But what they did do was encourage our imagination. We were always going camping at weekends and holidays as a family, and I would just go off with my ‘chav’ mates in the woods, build huts and mucking around, and it was all free play and imagination, which I loved. Our parents just let us do whatever we wanted in terms of what interested us.
Yes, I think I was. My grandmother said I was always irritating, like always asking ‘Why?’.
At school, I was always one of those kids who would challenge the teacher, but in a cheeky way so that they still liked me. I always questioned why stuff had to be done like that and the normal route to things.
Why do I need to get straight into a 9 – 5, get married and have kids? That traditional way of thinking did not really sit well with me.
We moved to Auckland’s North Shore, and I started at the beginning of high school, which was a massive culture shock.
Then after school going to Dunedin, I was really just looking for a new experience: I honestly just wanted to go and party, and that is the truth of it.
Having an experience away from home with your mates felt really exciting, so that was just as important to me than the academic part. I don’t think I really over-thought it, though.
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My favourite class was visual art. I remember for my final project I did a fashion range with Bob Marley, The Beatles, Andy Warhol rip-offs, and stuff like that.
Jono De Alwis, who used to own the business with me, and I made temporary tattoos and would sell them to schoolkids to make extra money. It was very ‘only fools and horses’.
I also did a commerce degree in marketing, which has obviously been a useful field for me to understand. The role I often play with businesses is to be creative — but also to understand the entrepreneurial and commerce side of things. Some people are amazing creatives, but it can be really hard to apply that creativity to business sometimes, and you need both to level up.
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Dunedin was transformative for me, and I learned stuff from the courses for sure; but it also gave me more time to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do. I do think the place influenced that disruptive thing for me. Why are we doing that? ‘‘All bets are off’ is kind of how it felt when I was there.
One job at uni was pasting up posters, and I remember constantly thinking I could definitely make them better, so I went to the student magazine, The Critic, and asked if I could redesign some of the posters. They said no, but I thought it could be interesting — why not?
The following year I got a job at the magazine designing print ads, and it was literally moving pizza pictures and drop shadows around the page, which was my first ever experience of advertising. It was cool to be on the tools, although only at the bleeding edge of regional advertising.
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I started to get more interested in film and photography. I met a friend, Jon Thom, who had a small fashion brand called Moodie Tuesday in Dunedin, and we would scour Facebook and see which bands got the $5000 NZ On Air video grants and pitch for those.
The Critic had a Canon 7D that they would let me borrow, and I ended up filming a video for Jon’s brand. I had no idea really. Youtube tutorials saved me. But I always say that the process of starting the business for three years was essentially my education. I really learned on the job, being thrown in at the deep end and learning to colour-grade, edit, and write a script. It was paid but low-level work, and if I had $50 for the week to get some drinks and some groceries I was happy.
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Yeah. Jon was already doing a few things, but more on the fine art side, and we had a little studio by the Octagon.
There was never any plan, and it was just kind of following our noses for what opportunities we could sniff out. My degree was three years, but some of my mates were staying another year, so I stayed, too. It was super fun, and I just wanted to get more of a portfolio behind me before I moved back to Auckland.
Study definitely gave me some fundamentals about marketing and design in the way of thinking, but actually how to do it, I still had no idea. I would say 80 per cent of it was on-the-job for me.And trusting my eye and gut.
Even how to run a business and be a freelance creative I found really hard. I remember Googling how to make a quote template, an invoice, and I had no clue how to do that stuff.
But study taught me how to think like a designer and how to see what good design is. A lot of the grads I admire now, you look at some of their portfolios, and they might not know how to do the ad exactly, but you can tell they have good taste, and that is something that is really hard to teach.
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It’s taste and style. The baseline is exposing yourself to as much work as you can, good and bad. I always ask in interviews: what is an ad that is not one of mine or yours that you like, and what is one you don’t like?
You immediately get a sense of what their taste level is. Also, having a point of view. But it’’s having substance, not just having something that looks good, but having something to say that’s worth listening to.
Hilary and I met in our last year of university and started seeing each other. Alex came over a year before to look after the more admin and legal side.
Hilary brought a more academic marketing view, rather than design and creative, and between the three of us it was a really nice combination. It still is to this day. It was fun and scary. This is icking me out now, but I remember going up to the summit of Mount Eden and looking over Auckland, thinking ‘this city is pretty big, how are we going to do it here?’ But we got it done.
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I think we were naïve. We didn’t have the ambition we do now, and just thought if we go to Auckland and get some video projects we would be pretty happy. One foot in front of the other type carry on. We were comfortably ignorant in what our ambitions could be. A larger agency subcontracted us for a job on Burger King quite early on, and the job did not go that well. I thought if this is what advertising is like, I don’t want to be a part of it at all, so for a good couple of years we just did our own thing. You might say I overcorrected at that moment in time. But the job did really suck.
But now, while we are very much in the industry — I am proud we’re leading a new way of doing things within it. We still like to stand in our own lane and do our own thing. We do not want to become like other traditional ad agencies, it doesn’t really interest me.
Those first days in Auckland were definitely hard. We scraped our money together and rented a little villa in Mount Eden, working from the dining room and paying ourselves basically nothing. I think that’s the thing that sometimes annoys me.
People ask: ‘What’s your secret? How did it all happen so quickly?’ Well, it didn’t. It’s been 11 years now. It was all about focusing on doing really good work and putting that consistently over time. There is no substitute for it.
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There’s always a it of chaos and rock and roll with how we work, maybe that’s where the magic is. It is hard though you need to protect that. It comes back to the work and the people in the building. I definitely feel the pressure, though. It’s funny: you go to these award shows, and they are fun and everything, but when it gets to the end of the show, I think ‘I have to do it all again and come back next year with something as good or better.’ So the havoc needs attention to keep the fire burning.
We have repositioned the agency completely, which I think is landing great. It’s giving us a north star of what we want MS future to be.
We not defined by an ‘advertising agency’ anymore. We’re a creative company, because we don’t think that advertising is the solution for what lots of brands need at the moment.
We want to be the imagination department for businesses. The company you keep when you want to male something the world tally cares about. A lot of the work we make now is not really advertising; it’s a product or a series or something totally new. It just feels like advertising is a bit limiting and dirty sometimes.
Awards are really interesting. They are a currency of our industry and a form of third-party validation. When we won those two Grand Prix at Cannes, it was good for a business bump, but we were doing that work anyway. For me, the bit I love is still the ideas. When you are working with the team, when it lands, and you know it’s a really great idea.
Then when you present something to a client, they love it, you get paid to make it, that is the romance for me.
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The biggest pressure for me isn’t coming up with the ideas, but to have a client that is actually going to facilitate making them come to life. Someone with a shared ambition to do something truly new. The gap between what you want to make and what a client wants to make, are sometimes hard to align. When they do align it’s magic.
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A good idea has tension in it, which is not always about the visual. It’s about the insight and POV behind it. Often good ideas are drawing weird parallels between different things that shouldn’t mix. We just pitched for some work in Australia for a law firm, and we were trying to land this strategic line, all around them being local.
They are in local communities, and local people. On my dog walk, there was a huge, wonky, hand-drawn mailbox sign, obviously done by kids, saying The Smith Family. So in the end, the line as part of the pitch was: You work harder when you know the names on the mailbox. It’ not groundbreaking, but it’s a good example of a bit of real life helping make an idea. That’s where most of my ideas come from me,not often from sitting at my computer.
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We do turn away a lot of work at the moment, which is nice to be able to do, but it can be hard from a business perspective when you are trying to support people. It might be an easy job with good money, but it still takes creative fuel out of you and your team to execute it.
A recent project had some challenges in post-production getting it to where we wanted it to go, and as a creative director you have to know when to have the confidence to push the eject button. To be like ‘this is not good enough’ or ‘this is not working’, and look for a new direction, or try a completely new thing, which can seem quite drastic at times. I do that all the time, and it is just to protect the idea and the quality of it, and in order to do that you sometimes have to have difficult conversations and piss a few people off. People never mind in the end when the work is reborn better though.
I don’t think my younger self knew where we could go or where we were heading. I did not even have a compass. Hilary and I talk about it a lot, being satisfied with what you have got, because it is really easy to get on the treadmill. Obviously, as a business and as a creative, you want to do bigger projects and get push your work wider, but you have to walk a fine line, and achieve a balance — life vs work ambition. I do think our whole business has just been following our gut, and we both still love living in our house with our dog, and I still want to do that. I just really love New Zealand.
I have asked myself, would I be creatively fulfilled if most of my work is still doing a campaign with billboards and digital ads? Probably not. But if it is applying creativity to business, or a product, or a film — it could be anything — then yes. And we are starting to get that work now, more talking to a business and thinking: How can we change what this brand is, maybe physically or in another way, and not just a campaign? How do people absorb advertising? I am not sure if the future will need more ads, but it’s going to need better ideas.
Someone said the other day that working with us might make you feel uncomfortable. But it means you’re moving towards somewhere new. I guess that’s Motion Sickness. The same applies to running the business itself, I feel a bit sick sometimes too, but that’s what makes it exciting.
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