Bradley Hasse, Director

Our French Odyssey

Hi - thank you for taking an interest in hearing more about our story! Here’s a quick background…

OUR FAMILY

Bradley: Film and Commercial Director www.bradleyhasse.com
Violette: Singer-Songwriter www.violettemusic.com, and owner of a talent agency www.lvertalent.com
Annabelle: 9 years old, 4th grade
Hugo: 5 years old, preschool

“Normal” Location: Montclair, New Jersey, United States
Current Location: Nantes, France (about 2 hours west of Paris by train), since July 2020

We spent the first wave of the pandemic like many families, locked down in our home with remote schooling and remote work. I work in advertising and film and almost every shoot was closed down at that time, and Violette’s industry based on giant group gatherings obviously did not have much better luck.

Come summer of 2020, we saw that Covid numbers were down in the East Coast, as well as in France (where Violette is from), and decided that we could safely take a trip to Europe to visit family. As a way to supplement our income we put our home up on Airbnb for the two months that we would be away. It fully booked up within 24 hours.

Once in France, we experimented by opening up the home for longer and sure enough, the market was there for it to get rented again and again. At first it was families looking to escape the city, and then when the “new normal” started to take place it became almost like a corporate housing for families moving from the West Coast to East Coast. They’d rent for a few months while looking for a home to buy in the area.

Long story short, we found a place to stay in France, enrolled the kids in school and have been here ever since. This upcoming August we will return back to our home in the US, but in the meantime we’ve had an incredibly enriching experience here.

CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS

One major shift is that my wife and I started working more creatively with each other. The combination of both of our industries getting shut down, being in lockdowns, and also living in France where our cost of living was much lower gave us more free time for this to organically happen. It was a surprising bi-product of all these changes in our life. Here’s a few of those projects:

CHRISTMAS HARMONY - MUSIC VIDEO

We were at home on a Saturday night in lockdown, Violette had the melody for a Christmas song and asked if I’d join in on writing some lyrics. We stayed up all night writing, had fun, and when we were finished we decided that it was worth her recording it and that we should actually make a music video for it as well. We got a few, great local collaborators to help and a few weeks later the track was done and we were filming at our home.

We wanted to make something joyful, but with the pandemic going on the only safe party we could throw was with toys, so that’s what we did. You can see some behind the scenes on the local news below.

You’ll see that all of the toys used are from Playmobil. In the end, the brand actually saw it and officially turned it into a holiday campaign. You can see the full music video here, and the cutdown here.

PLAYMOBIL STAR TREK - COMMERCIAL

Playmobil kept in touch after that and we started acting as a “boutique agency,” pitching commercial ideas for their upcoming products. Here’s one we did for their Star Trek Enterprise release.

We shot this in Budapest, and the exciting thing about living in Europe is that so many locations are easy to get to, so for the first time in my career the whole family was able to make it to the shoot.

MR FARFELU - MUSIC VIDEO

Here’s another song that Violette wrote. I directed the live action part here in France at a local studio and co-directed the animation with a friend back in NY.

STRINGS OF JOY - FEATURE FILM

When we first arrived I was finishing post production on my first feature (“Songs for a Sloth”, now released on AppleTV+ and AmazonPrime) and one of the final elements needed was the voice over for one of the main characters, a puppet voiced by Jack McBrayer, and I did that remotely from our home in France, dialing in with Jack back in LA.

With Violette and I collaborating more, and wanting to create more “feel good” content that could be put out into the world, we decided to start writing my next movie with each other. We’ve finished up the treatment for a film about an American pop star who meets a local French street performer and writes her upcoming album with him while trying to hide away from the record label. There are a lot of personal elements in there including the cross over of cultures, commentary on the music and film industry, and locations that we frequent as a family. We’ve started sending this treatment around as we get into writing the screenplay and hope that one day we can return to film the project - something that would definitely be a product of this entire experience.

MORE

Those are a few of the projects we collaborated on together. There are more. But also, our “normal” careers have picked back up again as well.

VIOLETTE - MARCH 11, 2022 IN PARIS (THIS WEEK!!!)

Violette has a show at Studio de l’Ermitage in Paris this Friday, March 11. She’ll be performing a lot of new music that she has written while here in France as well as songs from her recent album. You can also see some of her other music videos here.

Pending permission from the venue, we’d be excited to have you join for this concert.

COMMERCIALS & FILMS

At the moment I am mainly working on pitching a few feature and television projects in-between shooting commercials. Since moving here I started a production company, along with Violette, to handle more of these creative works that are happening and have been using that to also service the commercials that I direct. This includes the Playmobil one here in Europe and also some work back in the United States that I fly back for. Here’s one of those campaigns.

THANK YOU!

This journey has proved to be a wild ride so far and it’s still going!

If you’d like to join us during some of the events currently happening (as well as of course having access to our archive of photos and videos from along the way) we’d be excited to speak with you more. Thank you for having a look!

Sincerely,

-Brad, Violette, Annabelle, and Hugo