He was a teenager in front of the cameras. He acted in commercials from the age of 14. He played guitar, too, and vaulted out of a Richmond Hill, Ont. high school to a hosting and performing role on a 1970s weekday CBC series. He went to school to learn the academic theory and hands-on skills needed in the entertainment business and, after school, he bounced about to nearly every corner of the business, from music to film to television shows and spots, from Toronto to New York and back again.

But it wasn’t until David Storey had a child of his own in the late 1980s that he decided it was time to cast his lot with directing and finally be ‘serious about something.’

Today, when Storey zooms in on a commercial project, he’s looking to make the product a star. Sounds like a common-sense approach, but it’s an expression of intent not always front and center with commercial directors.

It’s the best way Storey, currently represented by commercial house Derek Van Lint and Associates, knows to put together a shoot. Since he took that m.o. with the many music videos he’s directed, he stayed on the same course when he started directing commercials three years ago.

Stripes was his original production house and Storey’s reel from his years there features a number of examples of creative in which the story is told by way of people in their work or hobby environments. There’s more emphasis on real workers or even cloggers to tell the story than there is on actors. In one spot for Ontario Ford and Mercury Dealers, hockey commentator Don Cherry is supposed to be assuming a mysterious Michael Jackson persona. But as Storey admits, even with that type of creative setup, it’s easier to get Cherry to be Cherry than anything else.

Still, Storey displays a flair for working with people on camera and bringing out their natural charm. Spots for Newfoundland Tel and Alberta Government Telephone, for instance, feature non-actors. In the agt spot, one slice-of-life sequence sets some young cloggers – Storey spotted them at the Schomberg, Ont. country fair – in creative that tells how the telephone brings your world to you. For Newfoundland Tel, employees talk about their work and customer service in in-office settings.

A consistent, refreshing, aspect of Storey’s work is that it’s got a being-Canadian-is-ok feel about it, and there’s an undertone running through it that celebrates Canada’s rural roots. Like the cloggers in the agt spot or the overriding spirit in an eight-spot series for Canada Quest, a project of the federal government aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship among Canadians. The series, with a ‘Yes we can, Canada’ theme, features business success stories and, again, no actors.

‘With real people,’ says Storey, ‘the less stuff you have around them the better. (You could use) a camera on a long lens and you try to cover it up, and you keep people away and then I just sit down and talk to them.’

Rapport with talent is essential, but Storey says he has found his real strength as a director is working on location. He came to this conclusion with his big-break directing gig with a come-back clip for Stompin’ Tom Connors called I am the Wind. It was his first location shoot. ‘That’s when I realized that’s my thing. I’m very good at doing that sort of thing, making the best of what’s there rather than doing something from scratch (in studio).’

Following the Connors piece, Storey dispensed with using actors in videos purely for look-good purposes and made sure that if he used talent, they were there to advance the story line. ‘No more dance-model posed things. I got into soulful stuff.’

After lots of practice on $2,000-$3000 bargain-basement clips, the Connors break led eventually to three videos for Tom Cochrane, including the big hit Life Is A Highway.

It’s not as if Storey’s just come lately to the entertainment business, however. A teen actor who found roles in commercials and the odd feature, he also hosted and performed for cbc’s Drop In, a weekday afternoon series in the 1970s. After finishing radio and television studies at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic in 1980, he shuttled between guitar playing and music making in the Toronto and New York music scenes. He also worked as an assistant, or second assistant, director in commercials (which is how he first met Derek Vanlint) and on such long-form projects as The Terry Fox Story and the mow Escape From Iran, as well as the feature Ticket To Heaven and such cbc series as Seeing Things and For The Record.

His move to commercial direction in 1991 seemed to him a natural extension of his video work. ‘Advertising and videos are very close cousins, and when I do an ad I say, `How can I make this product a star?’ ‘ So he brings a straight-ahead sensibility to the storyboards and, like others who cross over from videos, has had lots of practice injecting interesting visual images and structures and doing it all with impossibly low budgets.

Given that there isn’t as much commercial work around as there used to be, Storey continues to pursue long-form projects. He’s excited that his dramatic short, Longboat, the story of an internationally famous Canadian Native runner, aired just before Christmas on cbc. He’s also pleased that the Longboat experience set him up to land directing work on five episodes of cbc’s Comics series. His progress continues on the video front, where he’s racked up wins in the country categories at the Canadian Music Video Awards, and is hoping for wide u.s. release for a Charlie Major clip he directed.

Meantime, on a bitter, all-Canadian winter forenoon, he reflects on newly-made ad agency acquaintances from the early rounds with dvla reps Walt Mitze and Mark Bisson.