The Partners’ Film Company director Britt Randle has launched his commercial directing career with a New York Festival Silver Award-winning spot to spice up his reel.

‘Heroes,’ a 60-second black-and-white psa for the United Way, is part of a three-spot campaign combining four different scenarios of people who are themselves in need of help, yet still find a way to give to the cause.

The spot has a solemn and sad feel to it, starting off with an old woman standing with her walker at the stove. Shots flash from close-ups of her hands to a wrinkled face and to a blurred image of her sitting alone at a table.

Next is the story of a young man sitting in a hospital with a doctor walking towards him, then an unemployed gentleman standing in a washroom looking into the mirror, and finally a youth care worker gazing through a fence.

Mark Falkins, creative director and partner at bmr, Sault Sainte Marie, Ont., coined the creative and dop Eric Tomasson shot the campaign in an unused wing of a Toronto hospital over one day in October.

While the original plan called for only one :30, once they saw the footage, Randle and Partners’ Post editor Sabena Kapil couldn’t resist delving deeper into each story, which meant more spots.

Although the United Way campaign marked Randle’s advertising debut it was not his first attempt at directing. The Toronto-based abstract painter and Ryerson Film School graduate had his first shot behind a camera about a year ago with a French opera video for Bravo!.

‘I did the Bravo! piece for myself, I wanted to do something that was a real self-expression where I wasn’t answering to anyone,’ he says. ‘It was a strange black-and-white piece with caged angels and this whole world that I created.’

In his final year of film school, Randle won a City of Toronto Film Apprenticeship Award, which allowed him the opportunity to work on a feature shooting in the city, which at the time was either David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch or On My Own, a European film starring Judy Davis.

‘I picked the European film,’ says Randle, paint brush in hand. ‘I wanted to work as an art director on a small film so I could see what it was all about and how a film got put together on a fairly low budget. It was a great experience, but I found my painting took over and consumed all my time and I fell away from [filmmaking] for awhile.’

With directing back in his blood Randle took his opera video to Partners’ and on the same day was added to the roster.

Randle recently wrapped a music video for local Toronto singer Lorna Vallings which he says contains elements from his art work with lots of layered colors and texture.

His next step is to shoot a short narrative based on his own life experiences: after his short-lived film career, and prior to getting into commercials, the director/ painter spent over two years as a missionary, working among the poor throughout Central America and the Middle East. So, when it came to shooting a psa for the United Way, he was a natural.