How STCHM are Breaking the Mould of Advertising

Stoichemaan (STCHM) is a director–cinematographer duo working where absurdity meets precision and high-concept cinema bends into the illogical. Emerging from playful riffs on language and ‘syntax errors’, their practice revolves around developing characters and worlds that feel both nonsensical and inevitable.

Merging imagination, technology, and humour, STCHM creates works that resist linear narrative and surface instead as anti-narrative artefacts – ‘transposed disturbances’ of modern visual ontology. Their productions, from films and series to meta-documentaries, are accompanied by Indexicals: speculative notes that frame each project as a self-negating study of format and form.

The directing duo sat down with LBB to discuss their upcoming projects, being self-described “director-entrepreneurs,” and being drawn to the surreal

LBB> What are some upcoming projects that you’re excited about?

STCHM> We’re always most excited about the ones that appear out of nowhere. The self-initiated ones – the ones that begin as a joke or an accident and somehow turn serious.

Right now, that means a Fisherman’s Friend spec that probably shouldn’t exist, a STCHM launch montage that feels more like a fever dream than a brand film, and Stikkiman – an AI-born character wandering somewhere between meaning and nonsense. We like projects that don’t quite know what they are yet. That’s usually where something interesting starts breathing.

LBB> What excites you in the advertising industry right now?

STCHM> The collapse. The cracks. The noise of something ending and something else trying to form.

Advertising has been obsessed with persuasion; now it’s starting to sound a bit like confusion. That’s good. Out of confusion comes curiosity.

As director-entrepreneurs, we’re interested in using new tools – AI, real-time workflows, hybrid processes – not to make things smoother, but stranger. We like shortcuts that lead somewhere unexpected.

LBB> What elements of a script set one apart?

STCHM> When the writer sees it as open source. The best scripts are unfinished – not polished, not perfect. They have a pulse but also a hole somewhere. A gap where new people can enter.

For STCHM, it’s always about the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously. There’s enough seriousness in the world already. We like the tone that says, ‘This might not make sense, but it feels alive.’

LBB> How do you approach creating a treatment?

STCHM> You start with the wrong thing. A feeling, not a concept. Maybe a cigarette. A sidewalk café in Lisbon. You talk about everything but the project until something human slips through.

Then, slowly, a rhythm appears – a heartbeat, a tone. That’s when the treatment begins to write itself. We build from the inside out – first the character, then the world bending around them. For us, a treatment is not an answer; it’s a question that invites others to play.

LBB> If it’s a new brand or unfamiliar market, how important is research?

STCHM> Research is useful until it kills the surprise. Enough people have already analysed the brand.

We’d rather arrive like guests who don’t quite know the language – and learn it by listening, not studying. Our best work usually comes from not knowing too much. From seeing things sideways.

LBB> What’s the most important working relationship for a director?

STCHM> The person with the most imagination and courage. That’s it. Someone who’s not afraid of saying “What if we made it weirder?” or “What if we just stopped explaining it?”

The best relationships are built on that shared risk – when everyone understands that something might fail, and that’s the point.

LBB> What type of work are you most passionate about?

STCHM> We chase characters who shouldn’t exist, but somehow do – muscles on a face, a man with a pointy nose, a snowman made of AI. Worlds that unfold because of them. We’re drawn to the surreal not because it’s decorative, but because it’s honest. When reality stops behaving, people reveal who they really are.

LBB> What misconception about you or your work do you often encounter?

STCHM> That surrealism is unserious. But for us, absurdity is the most precise form of truth. We work inside and against advertising – using its tools to expose its contradictions.

Advertising wants clarity, control, conversion. STCHM prefers free association, play, and contradiction.

Where advertising simplifies, we complicate. Where it imposes meaning, we generate it through nonsense. That’s not rebellion – that’s equilibrium.

LBB> What’s the craziest production problem you’ve faced?

STCHM> Everything is a problem until it turns into rhythm. Desert heat shutting down a camera, AI hallucinating the wrong eyes on a face – all of it is material. Our process is to let the chaos talk first, then find the poetry hiding inside it.

LBB> How do you strike the balance between collaboration and protecting the idea?

STCHM> There is no balance. Balance is static. We prefer motion – ideas passing hands, mutating, collapsing, re-emerging. If the core remains alive, the rest can transform. When it works, no one owns it anymore – it just breathes.

LBB> Thoughts on opening production to a more diverse pool of talent?

STCHM> Always. The world needs more eyes, more rhythms, more contradictions. STCHM has always been a playground. Whoever wants to play is welcome.

LBB> Your work now lives across many formats — how do you think about that while working?

STCHM> We think in worlds, not formats. A character can exist as a film, a still, a sound, a glitch on a website. Each fragment belongs to the same orbit – everything is part of the same gravitational pull.

LBB> What’s your relationship with new technology?

STCHM> Technology is a collaborator. Sometimes obedient, sometimes mischievous. We use it to stretch an idea until it starts misbehaving. Tools don’t matter as much as tone. It’s about keeping curiosity intact while the machines hum.

LBB> Which pieces of your work show you best?

STCHM> ‘Everyone Loves Muscles’ – Absurd sincerity. A boy whose muscles have taken over his face. A love letter to contradiction.

‘Splitcuits’ – Transformation and humor as two sides of the same surreal coin.

‘Pointy Nose Chronicles’ – A developing series where eccentric characters bend the worlds they inhabit until they break.