This 'yoga video' sums up the agony of commercial freelancing

Last year, freelance director Eno Freedman Brodmann laid bare the ridiculousness of the advertising pitching process in a wickedly funny short film, "The Pitch." Now, he's back with a new short in the form of a genre many of us have become very familiar with over the pandemic: the online yoga video. 

Freedman Brodmann wrote, directed and stars in the video himself as Gavin, a freelancer begging for work who's also making a yoga video to give some tips about the process of sending "that mindful last email."

In a nod to online yoga giants like "Yoga with Adriene," he has a cute pet dog join him on the mat. As he prays to the "email spirits" to get him out of the loop of "low-tier agency work," he tries to be calm and ignore his pinging email, but it's all to no avail. He ends up ranting on the ignominy of rejections, comparing yourself to others and trying to become "the master of your own inbox." The many humorous touches include him contorting himself into a pose mimicking a reclining laptop and being interrupted off screen by being asked what he wants for lunch. The final scene reveals that he's been hired for no money to create....a yoga video, on behalf of a brand.

Freedman Brodmann told Ad Age that the film was inspired by his own experience of trying to calm himself with yoga while sending out freelance pitches.

"When I was pitching and reaching out to many people for meetings at the start of the year, I was receiving a lot of out of office emails and found myself trying to do 'Yoga with Adriene' to calm my spiraling thinking. I was calm for the hour, but kept on trying to check the time to see when the yoga would be over so I could check my email again. I got extremely glued to my computer and gmail and would even wake up in the middle of the night with existential career questions and analyzing my childhood just based on a few email delays."

One aspect of the film is the focus on how rejection can impact freelancers' self-esteem.

"I feel and hope many creatives, especially these past few years, can relate to the self-criticism and spiraled thinking when work emails are light," said Freedman Brodmann. "I also really wanted to shine a light on some experiences I've had in the past where record labels or some brands expect freelancers to jump and do all the jobs at once. In need to build a reel and our portfolio when coming up, most of us do this."

The film is also about our inability to focus in the modern world, he added.

"We exist in a fragmented attention space too, with TikToks and quick 6 second pre-roll ads and Instagram. Often we won't be present anymore, and will just attend to our constant dings and text notifications. It actually never makes me feel better to check a notification or an email instead of being present with my ideas or friends. I was reading something that talked about how it takes people 18 minutes to re-focus their thoughts after checking a text."

Freedman Brodmann worked with Kate Galliers, who produced "The Pitch," at Little Bear Studios, and looped in a real brand, sustainable cleaning products company So Good General Store, to help fund the film. The company "had loved The Pitch and wanted to make something fun and deeply comedic," said Freedman Brodmann.

Starring in the film himself was a "fun experience," he said. "The wig cut off most of the blood flow to my head so I think the meltdowns were pretty authentic."

And he had fun creating the character of Gavin: "I watched so many yoga videos online and wondered what kind of person they were after the camera turned off. Were they all peaches and cream 24/7? What if they were having breakdowns and were incredibly different behind the camera?"

Despite his freelance existential agony, Freedman Brodmann has seen success with "The Pitch," which won awards including a Ciclope, 1.4 Award and Gold for Writing at Kinsale Shark Awards, and nominations at The Webbys, ADC and more. He recently signed with Ruffian as a director. And, he said, he's been doing lots of yoga.