Into the Library with The Perlorian Brothers

We first started directing out of necessity.

We were creatives at Ogilvy in Toronto and our Timex client wanted to be on TV. Timex's Canadian office consisted of the president and the receptionist. It was an Olympic year and Timex had directed all of its global offices to run print advertising. But the Canadian president didn't want print advertising. He wanted to be on TV. 

We didn't yet think of ourselves as directors but we knew what we liked. 

So we took his tiny print budget, and with our creative directors Nancy Vonk and Janet Kestin, we wrote and directed a little campaign to run on the games. It was the beginning of a no-money/TV-ambitions approach that we applied to many underfunded brands with great success. Nowadays the budgets are much bigger, but we still have a lot of that low-budget pragmatism baked into our decision making.

 

   

We hated spec spots. They reeked of neediness. All we wanted was to make strange and wonderful little confections like Traktor and Pep Bosch and Brian Baderman. Ads that felt like they were beamed in from another planet. We weren't interested in a no-budget phony-pants Nike spec spot that no one cared about.

Before we left agency life to become full-time directors, we knew we needed one more piece for our quirky little reel. Our producer James Davis told us to write something quickly that we could shoot in an afternoon. We decided to invent a brand. We came up with the name. We drew the logo. We wrote the spots. We cast some guy who was leaving to join the Canadian Military the next day. We found a rabbit and sleeveless shirts that said 'Tokyo'. Our friend Steve Angel at Headgear Animation made the little logo dance.

 

            

When we started directing full time, we had a new start up off-shoot production company built up around us: Reginald Pike was envisioned like an oddball collective that had a mysterious sense of weird obscurity in the way they did things. We would show up at the office everyday at 10am with our computers and our pastries and wait to see what scripts came in. There was a little bell that sat beside the fax machine and whenever a script came through we'd ring the new script bell madly. 

The Vim script came in for another director. We begged to pitch. We were not fans of tricky reveal ads but we had the sense that if we created enough mood and drama we could get away with the surprise at the end. We liked these British IKEA ads with mobsters that Dom and Nic directed and thought we could shoot the bathroom with the same sense of tension as they managed. But when we got to casting, everything felt terrible. There was no mood, no tension, no drama. It was kinda the first time that we really realised you've got to sit through a lot of painful interpretations to find the one golden performer. 

Finally our casting director brought in an actor who was just off a women's prison mini-series. She took the character seriously and when she screamed out "I love you baby" in the casting session with tears rolling down her face, we knew we were gonna be OK. The agency was zig and the creatives were Aaron Starkman and Stephen Lepps, and bless their tender little souls for bringing us our first Gold Lion just a few months after we’d started into the biz. 

 

            

In 2005 Mother London was the most interesting agency in the world. Everything they made felt subversive and arty. And maybe nothing was as subversive as the Fanta Z spot that we were lucky enough to collaborate on with the Swedish spousal team of Cecila Dufils and Markus Bjurman. How Mother sold a spot to Coca-Cola that basically said, "we are making a new version of our product, because the existing one is shit and people hate it," is testament to their superpowers. 

We shot it on the island of Mallorca. UK ad legend and Mother founder Mark Waites showed up on the last day and insisted we find a pair of douche-y white loafers for the final shot. Wardrobe went running around the island (home to Camper and good taste footwear fashion) to find the perfect tacky shoes. And he was right. The shoes are just the right detail. 

All the spitting didn't sit so well with the mums and dads. We remember sitting in on a crisis meeting with Coca-Cola’s PR heads wringing their hands. The spot became one of the most notoriously talked about (and complained about) adverts in UK history. 

 

Will Ferrell had been doing a Robert Goulet character on Saturday Night Live when Chris Beresford Hill wrote the real Robert Goulet into a Super Bowl spot for Emerald Nuts. Goodby Silverstein was such a hothouse of talent and clever ideas. We think Rich and Jeff really pushed people to be smart and bold and interesting. And they seemed to hire people who were up to the task. 

We shot it in Toronto. Goulet was charming and jovial and ready to try anything. The funny thing is nobody had really decided on what the ending of the spot wanted to be. There was lots of discussion in the lead up to our shoot day and we had a green screen on set to get Mr. Goulet crawling around so we could put him on the walls or the ceiling or whatever. Goodby didn't fly down for the shoot but he kept tabs on us throughout the day. At one point in the afternoon he had the idea that Mr. Goulet should turn into a dog. He emailed sketches of what he was hoping we would shoot. Alas, we had no dog on set and a very full one day of coverage to get. So we never got the dog shot. But the finished spot did cause a bit of a sensation and AdAge chose it the best spot of the game. We had the opportunity to work with Goodby Silverstein on another Super Bowl campaign a few years later and caused another minor sensation with Denny's Nannerpus.

Robert Goulet passed away about six months after the spot aired. It was one of the last things he worked on and got a mention in his New York Times obit. 

 

            

Eyebrows were raised when notoriously staid Procter & Gamble handed its Old Spice brand to creative hot-shop Wieden+Kennedy. P&G were known to focus test everything. And W+K famously tested nothing. 

A few months into this unlikely partnership, W+K made zombie-killing legend Bruce Campbell the Old Spice ‘Man of Experience’ in a hilarious spot directed by Dayton Ferris. When Dayton Ferris went off to shoot the Oscar-winning ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, Wieden tapped us for the follow up: a louche interpretation of Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’. 

The spot was created by Aaron Allen, Michael Illick, Monica Taylor and Mark Fitzloff, and we helped execute it as a ‘Night at the Playboy Mansion’ inspired performance piece. The spot wanted throwback Hollywood party vibes and we shot it in a great house in the Hills. We went black tie for Mr. Cambell and sexy cocktail dresses for the models. We wanted the whole thing to feel like a bit of lost tape from a different time.

The spot made a big musky splash and gave P&G the confidence to get even more outrageous with the brand. 

 

            

There is no one in the business like Nat Lawlor. The good lord blessed him with a completely original mind and the tenacity of a bulldog. 

We were fortunate to work with Nathaniel on a few different campaigns over the years, but this Sonic campaign through Goodby and Silverstein is the most memorable. We shot eight or nine spots over a series of three or four shoots. Each spot was shot at the drive-in and each spot featured a completely absurd character interacting with a Sonic product. It was kind of formulaic – except the characters were so wild and the writing was so good. We shot a suburban vampire and a werewolf in a tank top. We shot a robot made out of cardboard boxes. We shot an amorous couple with soft ice cream heads. A 19th century ghost. A man baby in a onesie. An eggman with a poncey British accent. 

Each spot is a great set piece, but taken as a whole they really feel special. 

Nathanial isn't credited as co-director on these, but he could be. Our memory is of him running constantly and wildly between the client tent and the director's monitor. He wrote and rewrote madly during the shoot days. He knew exactly how he wanted the dialogue to sound. His great sense and high standards certainly helped make this campaign so interesting.

 

            

Potty humour isn't really our thing. Still, there was something undeniable about BBDO's ‘Social Farter’ spot for the Ontario Ministry of Health. Years of truth.com spots from Crispin, Porter & Bogusky set a very high bar for anti-smoking ads, and this script from Deborah Prenger, Tony Lee and Nancy Crimi-Lamanna was so funny and smart, it felt like it could hold its own against those award winners. And sure enough, it brought home a Lion from Cannes and CNN said "it might be the best public service announcement you'll ever see."

Throughout the process we tried our best to temper the base humour. We sought an actor who leaned soft and sweet. We favoured performance that was understated and earnest. We went a little elegant with the lensing. And on the day we tried to really create a mood that felt natural and real.

All of that said, shooting the dance scene where we'd stop the music and scream out "FART!" is some of the most fun we can remember having on set.

 

            

When DDB Stockholm sent the first batch of Klarna scripts to our London office, no one quite knew what to make of them. It was a thin document – a few loose pictures, very few words and a tiny budget. Our producers scratched their heads. But we thought it was the most exciting thing we'd seen all year. And after talking to the creatives, we were certain we could make something pretty special. 

We all thought they could be a little more like video art than like a traditional commercial. That they could be minimal, repetitive, hypnotic, surreal. But figuring out how to pull it off was a bit of an ordeal. The budget would not allow for set builds and the necessary post work. So, with the confidence and guidance of Glassworks VFX, we decided to do the whole thing in CG. 

Everyone had to be on the same page and decisive – which (in the pre-Zoom era) was a bit of a challenge with creatives in Sweden, producers in London, directors in North America and CG artists in some places we can't remember....Amsterdam? Barcelona? Who knows? 

But somehow we did it. We all shared a vision, we all wanted the same thing from the project and we kept each other honest. 

Truthfully, there's only one thing we remember a bit of debate over. We did an early test of the fish sliding down the slide with little human baby arms protruding from its sides. The agency thought it was too much. We pushed a little. But they pushed back. And they were right. The spot is strange enough without them.

 

            

With the pandemic fully upon us and the world shut down, we were just sitting in our homes furiously sanitising our groceries like everyone else on the planet. It would be a few months before the Canadian government would declare film production an “essential service”.

Then came the call from Oslo — an urgent need to promote sex toys to men created by Anders Arnoldsen Holm and Thea Emanuelsen and the libidinous minds at agency Pol. We've always had an affinity for unusual stories out of unusual places and we'd never received a board from Norway before. 

The words 'sex toy commercial' are a bit of a joke unto themselves. Talk about low hanging fruit. But this script had so much pathos and humanity and surreality. There was nothing tawdry or goofy about it. It just felt like a love story with innocence and heartbreak baked right in. Working with our good friends at HOBBY Films out of Stockholm we put together an entirely remote production run by Latvia’s resourceful Chubby Unicorn. And with streaming iPads held by PA’s as our eyes and ears, we scouted, cast and shot this epic little romance story in a very long sunrise-to-sunset day in and around Riga. 

The romantic co-star, the hand, was 3D printed by robot lasers via our production design wizard, Juris Žukovskis, who works out of an old Soviet-era factory not far from the Russian border.

And in spite of covid (or perhaps because of it), lonesome Norwegian men got the message and an online sales surge ensued.

           

We'd been big fans of the Kayak work Paul Caiozzo and his band of creatives at Supernatural had been doing. So we were happy as frogs to find their latest campaign on our desks. 

The spots had a lot going for them conceptually, but what we found most interesting were the deeply flawed, deeply delusional heroes at their centre. The spots were written as monologues, but no one wanted the characters to speak directly to camera like spokespeople. The trick, we thought, was to find a different eye-line or a different audience for the ranting than the camera itself. 

In the case of the farmer, we decided to bring in a chicken as her sidekick and have her deliver her first lines to the bird. This little shift not only takes some pressure off the dialogue, it also clearly establishes her as a bit of a wildcard. A madwoman. An unreliable narrator. As always, good casting and amazing performance makes you forget there were ever options about how to play it. Actor Helen Wilson knocks it out of the park. And: the chickens are pretty ace, too. If you need well-trained poultry you can't do much better than shooting in Uruguay. The two chickens hit their mark every single time.