Bending Time and Space with Rattling Stick Director Michael J Ferns

Some filmmakers discover their calling late. Michael J Ferns discovered his at 12, with a camcorder, a patient sister and a moment of revelation: film isn’t about recording reality, instead it’s about rewriting it.

That fascination with construction – with the alchemy of a cut – carried him through an early BAFTA win and into a career spanning children’s TV, short films, and ultimately, commercials.

Now one of Rattling Stick’s most precise and instinct-driven directors, Michael speaks to LBB about balancing taste with collaboration, the strange grace of short storytelling, and why the rise of AI has only deepened his commitment to human craft.

LBB> Did you always know you wanted to work in commercials, and what first inspired you to work in this industry?

Michael> I can’t say that commercials were ever part of some master plan. I fell in love with the magic trick of filmmaking, that strange ability to bend time and space and make people believe what they see.

I was 12, running around with a clunky VHS camcorder and my long-suffering sister as the star of everything. I still remember the revelation that you could film her walking through a door on one side and cut to her emerging on the other. It’s the simplest idea in film: continuity. But when you’re 12, with no tutor, you truly are learning from first principles. It feels like you’re discovering fire. You suddenly realise that storytelling isn’t about recording reality, it’s about constructing it.

Commercials came later, but that same fascination stayed with me. The whole form is about distilling time and emotion into something brief but complete. I’ve always been drawn to precision, to that satisfaction of getting it right. In that sense, directing a 30-second ad and cutting that first ‘door’ shot aren’t so different. Both are small acts of turning chaos into coherence. That early wonder, the feeling that you can make sense of the world one cut at a time, has never really left me.

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LBB> You started making films at just 12 and won a Scottish BAFTA at 16 — how did that early recognition shape your path?

Michael> It all started, rather improbably, with ‘Taggart’, Scotland’s own crown jewel of crime drama. (For those who imagine nothing but glens and sheep beyond the M25, you’ve clearly never heard “there’s been a murder” delivered with proper Glaswegian conviction.) They filmed an episode at my grandparents’ house, and watching that mesmerising process, lit a spark that’s never gone out.

From there, I enlisted mostly willing family members to die endless tragic deaths on VHS. Their patience was something special. Even then, I had a kind of single-minded focus. My parents, both teachers with what we in the industry call “real jobs,” never tried to talk me out of it. Their quiet support was permission to take the improbable seriously.

Winning a Scottish BAFTA at 16 added a touch of gold to the family’s black sheep (I have two incredibly accomplished sisters). For some, early success can be paralysing but for me, it was galvanising. It confirmed that if you work obsessively enough at something, it might just emerge from the chaos.

Since then, I’ve done my best to live by one rule: don’t chase someone else’s highlight reel, just outdo your last cut. Envy is a seductive poison. It’s your enemy and everyone else’s friend. The real contest is always with your former self. That’s progress and it’s where meaning lives.

LBB> You began your career in TV with projects like ‘The Official Chart Show’ and ‘The Dumping Ground – Sasha’s Story’. What led you to shift into commercials, and how did that transition take place?

Michael> Ah yes, my brief detour into what can only be described as the antithesis of my natural temperament: the glorious bedlam of live children’s television. ‘The Official Chart Show’ was a format I co-created with a veteran children’s TV producer shortly after moving to London in 2014. I unashamedly elbowed my way into the process, co-authored the treatment, directed the pilot, and to everyone’s mild astonishment, it was commissioned for 26 half-hour episodes.

What followed was a year of three hour’s sleep a night, a crash course in live broadcasting, and an endless parade of pop stars with wildly-varying levels of punctuality and charm. We even managed a Children’s BAFTA nomination, though we lost to ‘Horrible Histories’. Fair enough really, Aristotle and Einstein just had better material than Paloma Faith.

‘The Dumping Ground’ (or Tracy Beaker, for those over 25) was equally instructive. Television drama at that smaller scale feels less like authorship and more like conducting: essential work, but not necessarily expressive. It taught me somewhat about managing complexity, but not how to define it. I realised that if you can’t feel your own taste in the final image, you’ve surrendered something vital, at least so to me. Taste, after all, isn’t decoration, it’s orientation. It’s how you decide what matters.
By 2016, I deliberately moved into commercials, which rewards obsession with detail. In a half-minute of film, you have nowhere to hide. Every cut, every movement, every glint of light must carry intent and precision. And when all those details align, something special happens, the chaos collapses into clarity.

That’s what drew me in, really. Commercials aren’t just about selling things (well sometimes they are…) they’re about learning, again and again. That focus is what’s meaningful for me. In an age addicted to noise, that feels like an almost sacred, but difficult, pursuit.

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LBB> You’ve since worked with brands like Lego, Lovehoney, Dove, and Wren. How does your approach to storytelling differ between TV and advertising?

Michael> I wouldn’t call myself a seasoned television director, I’m really not, but the difference between TV and advertising storytelling still fascinates me. At its core, it’s about what you can assume of your audience’s speed of comprehension.

In commercials, you’re working inside a kind of creative haiku. You have 30 seconds, often less, to express a single, crystalline idea. The best ones hinge entirely on that one thought, and every choice, performance, camera, edit, has to orbit it faithfully. It’s the discipline of elegant simplicity, which, I hasten to stress, is not the same as mere simplicity. It’s a kind of expressive economy: what stays, what goes and what matters.
Television, by contrast, is about layering. A-stories, B-stories, C-stories, which can build richness but also, at times, convolution. It often dilutes time where advertising distils it.

In some sense, commercials have more in common with poetry than with cinema. They rely on inference, rhythm, and compression to create emotional truth. When you only have seconds, you learn to trust suggestion over explanation.

Each form demands a different kind of honesty. Television invites breadth, commercials demand essence. And if you don’t recognise that difference, you’ll make work that satisfies neither, too broad to move anyone, too thin to mean anything.

LBB> Working with such a wide range of brands, how do you maintain your creative vision while aligning with each client’s objectives and identity?

Michael> I’ve always thought of my taste as fairly classical. My work isn’t particularly fashionable, which, of course, I say with saintly humility and just the faintest bit of self-satisfaction. I’ve never chased the aesthetic trends that flare up in our industry like seasonal rashes. I’ll spare you the list of styles that make a reel look ancient after six months… we all know the culprits. Directing, at its core, is a cocktail of creativity, problem-solving, intuition, and diplomacy, and your vision is forged in constant dialogue, sometimes gentle, sometimes gladiatorial. The trick is knowing when to hold your ground and when to yield with as much grace as your ego can muster.

The truth is that creative debates aren’t won effectively through volume or stubbornness. They’re won through persuasion, by showing, sincerely and intelligently, that your instinct serves the story, and therefore, the brand. Those two aims aren’t enemies, they’re twin expressions of coherence.

Brands and agencies are ecosystems, chock full of hierarchies, egos, and anxieties like any workplace. The director’s challenge is to make the logic of your vision so clear that everyone, from the CMO to the most junior creative, just gets it.

Humility goes a long way. You have to stay open, because good ideas can come from anywhere. It’s about collaboration and bringing best instincts to the table, leaving ego out of it.

LBB> You’re known for cinematic photography and authentic human performances. How do you approach working with actors and creating honesty on screen? How would you describe your directorial style, and what have you learned most about yourself through directing?

Michael> My style has been shaped by the people I’ve worked with, by years of creative cross-pollination. Collaboration isn’t a compromise, it’s how you discover what you actually think. My incredible cinematographer, Alistair Little, has been a constant creative partner for nearly a decade, and together we’ve developed a shared instinct for imagery that feels sculpted, cinematic, and grounded in truth rather than trend. We both prefer classical tools, warm, tactile palettes, shaped light, and movement that comes from character, not choreography. If the camera moves, it should feel purposeful, not performative.

My production designer, Elizabeth Melinek, designs worlds that look entirely natural until you realise how much intent went into them, which is precisely the point. And Alexander Wells composes scores with a kind of invisible intelligence. His scores fit so cleanly inside the scene that you don’t notice it working. But it always does.

Over time, I’ve realised that taste, intuition, and confidence form the director’s internal compass. You’re asked a hundred questions an hour, you can’t soul search and equivocate over them all. The answers have to come from a vision clear enough that it feels instinctive. The job isn’t about control, it’s about alignment and helping talented people move toward the same goal without losing their individuality. When that happens, the film finds its rhythm.

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LBB> Your short ‘Better’ is provocative and thought-provoking, exploring the evolution of medical technology. What inspired it, and are you developing any other personal projects at the moment?

Michael> Despite appearances, ‘Better’ isn’t really about medical technology. That’s just the setting. The central question: where does parental love end and responsibility begin? It follows an overprotective mother, Jung’s Oedipal mother, whose devotion to her likely trans child blinds her to the world’s cruelty. I wanted to explore that tension between love’s warmth and love’s danger, how the instinct to protect can so easily become the instinct to control.

When ‘Better’ won the Iris Prize, I was genuinely shocked. It certainly isn’t an uplifting film and offers little moral comfort. We made it a few years back as the culture wars around gender and identity grew deafening, and I wanted to make something a touch quieter, about doubt, care, and the uneasy grace of not knowing.

I’m now developing a feature (who isn’t?) that again circles motherhood and faith, where protection becomes control and autonomy turns to neglect. It’s based on a remarkable true story, though I’ll leave it at that. What I can promise is that it won’t be a five-hour black-and-white meditation on despair. Commercials have taught me that the greatest sin in storytelling is boredom, and I intend to remain devoutly sinless.

LBB> How do you see advertising and filmmaking evolving and converging today? What role do you think advertising plays in culture — and how are you personally navigating shifts like the rise of AI versus the value of craft and humanity?

Michael> It’s what everyone seems to talk about now, with a blend of fascination, anxiety, and mild existential dread. I’ve experimented with it myself, and while it’s impressive, its limits are revealing, and not ones I think we’ll quickly overcome with a faster processor.

The truth is, our work only moves people when it feels human. Advertising, like cinema, depends on emotional belief, that sense of shared experience that comes from recognising yourself in another’s story. However dazzling an AI-generated film may look, as soon as the audience knows it wasn’t born of human intent, of intuition, risk, and soul, something in it dies. Authenticity isn’t a visual quality; it’s a felt one.

That said, I suspect AI will take its rightful place as a creative instrument, not a replacement, much as the camera once did to painting. When photography emerged, people feared the death of portraiture, what it did instead was free painters to be expressive again. I suspect we’ll see the same thing here: as AI becomes ubiquitous, human craft may paradoxically become more valuable, precisely because of its imperfection.

As for advertising’s place in culture, I’ve come to see it as less about persuasion and more about mirror-making. A kind of collective attempt to remind people who they are, or who they’d quite like to be. Yes, it can be a little delusional at times, we sell both dreams and dish soap, after all, but at its best, it’s a rare collaboration between commerce and art that actually connects with people. We all like to joke that “we’re not saving the world”. Correct, we’re not. Yet most of us behave as if the fate of civilisation hinges on the shade of a living room wall or the precise timing of a smile. But that’s part of the charm, isn’t it though? Beneath the deadlines and the polish sits a genuine desire to make something that resonates, however briefly. And when a film, even a 30-second one, makes someone smile, cry, or maybe even remember what matters, that’s no small cultural contribution.

And as for the future. God only knows. Maybe we’ll adapt, maybe we won’t. But if we can keep making work that feels alive, funny, flawed, occasionally searching, then perhaps the machines can have the efficiency. We’ll keep the doubt. It’s probably the most human thing we have left.