Always a man of extremes, Spy Films’ Jeff Eamer has confronted a director’s most notorious demons from the tiny to the mammoth in his flagrant disregard for the no kids and animals maxim. From a pair of bathing toddlers in the Japan Camera ‘Twins’ spot, Eamer went to dealing with Angus and Sheba, two pachyderms from the Bowmanville Zoo and the stars in one of a pair of spots for Winnipeg-based Investors Group through Vancouver’s Palmer Jarvis.

The elephants were intended as living metaphors for big banks’ lumbering insensitivity to the needs of the little guy, but Eamer reports the 12,000-pound elephants were considerably more agile and well-behaved than anyone else on set.

‘My challenge as a director was not to keep the elephants calm but to keep everyone else calm around the elephants,’ says Eamer.

The shoot took place in front of a converted bank and attracted, naturally, the attention of every school kid, local tv news crew, animal rights group (everything checked out okay) and slack-jawed pedestrian around.

The opening shots of the spot establish a Hudsucker Proxy-esque feel with a wide-angle, desolate-street scene and a lonely protagonist searching for financial contentment.

The elephant walk was followed by a one-day shoot in the desert outside of Ph’enix, Arizona, where the large entity facing the lone investor was a globe, visually manipulated using a Frazier lens system, developed by an insect photographer and one of only a handful in North America.

The system allows foreground elements to be as close as a half an inch from the lens without distortion. In this spot, it allowed a 12-inch globe to appear five stories high and then actual size to be picked up by the empowered star of the spot.

In terms of a philosophical approach to difficult spots, Eamer says kids and animals will only do things when there is peace and harmony around them.

The spots were shot by Peter Hartmann and edited by Jayne Morris Berry in Vancouver. Sound was by Koko Production/8th Avenue Sound.

-Franks’ @theready

Our neighbors to the south have a new reason to shoot their commercials in Canada, beyond making the most of the lower exchange rate and productions costs: @theready will give them a helping hand.

The Toronto-based commercial film service has just opened its doors.

Actually, the new company d’esn’t have its own double doors, never mind a building to call its own. President Michael Franks has set up shop in an office at Circle Productions. Executive producer Kim Turner is a friend and is renting him some space. Franks has worked as a freelancer throughout his 20-year commercial production career and produced a yet-to-be-released feature, Sabotage, through Apple Creek Productions and the tv series Mysterious Island for Atlantis.

He says American friends in the business are always asking for his help in mounting their productions in Canada and it’s about time he got paid for it.

For a fixed fee per shoot day, @theready will put together the entire commercial production for American companies ­ everything from crew, equipment, taking care of the production office, and working out the figures.

Jumping on the online bandwagon, the company already has a Web page: http:://www.interlog. com/-theready.

-People

Toronto’s Heathgate Films has added two Canadian directors in the form of Warren Wayne, a director/dop from Vancouver, and Stuart Shikatani, a director/dop from Toronto.

– Jane Charles is the new exec producer at Apple Box, replacing Greg Bosworth.

– Mike Cooper, Chrysler producer at bbdo, has departed the agency.

– Account guy Rob Nadler, previously with Palmer Jarvis on the McDonald’s account, has moved to Vancouver’s Moreland & Associates.

– Gavin Barrett exited his associate cd gig at Leo Burnett Hong Kong to take on senior copywriter duties at MacLaren McCann Toronto.

– Luc Merineau and Jean Garnache have been boosted to vp creatives at Publicis-bcp, Montreal

– Bo Ronnberg, president and creative director of Ronnberg McCann Sweden and eighth best-dressed man in Sweden, behind the King, will be the 1997 jury president for the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

-Clarification

Kessler Irish Films represents one director out of Crossroads Films, Willie Patterson, not Crossroads as a whole.