In a poem heralding the arrival of Leap batteries, Gary Prouk recently wrote, ‘Every great enterprise begins with a leap of faith.’ Subsequently, he and his team at The Sebastian Consultancy took a great leap in creating the entire image of the brand.

Prouk’s advertising and marketing consultancy was given a blank page on which to create the product’s image, in this case a simple battery. Leap Energy and Power Corp. president Brent Meikle approached Prouk and said he wanted his new brand to be the battery of tomorrow. Prouk relished the opportunity to make it happen.

‘The reason I’m so excited about this is that this is the reason I started The Sebastian Consultancy,’ he says. ‘In an agency or traditional company there is no way you would be able to do this. But when you work the way we work, directly with the client, and you have that kind of trust level, you can put together these kinds of task forces and control it.’

Prouk assembled a team that would be sure to get the new product noticed, including Desgrippes Gobe & Associates, which designed the packaging and the display materials. Once the look of the product was created, the next important task was to get Leap batteries on television.

In a quest to make the perfect commercial for the new brand, Sebastian considered many options, including American director Hype Williams. Sebastian then received a tape in the mail from graphic designer and director David Carson. After a quick viewing of the tape, Prouk knew at once he had found the person to helm the job.

‘I was looking at a three-minute film he did called Second Sight,’ says Prouk. ‘I slapped this tape in and after about 20 seconds I said to Chris [Nanos, Sebastian associate], ‘This is the answer to Leap; this is what we should be doing on television.”

After deliberations between the consultancy and Carson (with whom Sebastian had worked previously on the packaging design for Jamieson Vitamins), he began working with George Levai’s team at Optix on the Leap assignment – a project so secret Prouk insisted that everyone involved sign a waiver to ensure their silence. Optix co-owner Levai says this was not unusual or difficult for him. Prouk recalls that Carson, on the other hand, was terribly excited about the project and very anxious to talk about it.

‘He couldn’t say anything to anyone about the spots and it was driving him crazy,’ laughs Prouk.

Carson reportedly lived secretly three days a week in Toronto over a six-week period, working with Levai and associates at Optix, beginning work most evenings at 5 p.m. and then going straight through the night. The end result is a total of 16 Leap spots (four, really, with four versions of each) that truly defy description. In a blur of surreal imagery and sound, the spots leave viewers slack-jawed, not knowing exactly what they have seen. Nanos refers to the ads affectionately as ‘cluster-busters,’ because they will break up the arguable monotony of the average commercial break.

Levai says he enjoyed working with Carson on the spots, but admits the process was a long and complicated one. ‘We had a 3D animator working on elements and feeding them into the compositing suite for me,’ says Levai about his role in the creation. ‘There was a lot of compositing and trying to come up with something different. I would offer something to Carson and he would pick what he liked and didn’t like.’

Prouk also brought in Madonna producer Tony Shimkin to do the sound design. Shimkin incorporated bits of the poem written by Prouk, which has actually become Leap’s company mission statement. It ends as follows: ‘The giants don’t haltingly tip-toe into tomorrow, they leap into the future.’

The spots were unveiled at the Innovations 2000 trade show in Las Vegas, where Desgrippes Gobe & Associates won the Innovations 2000 Design and Engineering Award in the retail response category for the Leap point-of-sale materials. DD