Established commercial directors are the subject of this regular feature. Each issue we will profile their careers, accomplishments and the ideas that propel them to new advertising heights.

Minds Eye Pictures’ Rob King started in the ad business 20 years ago writing copy for local Saskatchewan car dealerships. Now, two decades later, King is an established commercial director and partner in Regina-based Minds Eye. He has made a career for himself without ever having to abandon his home on the Canadian prairies.

‘I’d get 50 bucks,’ King says of his initial spot-writing gigs. ‘These were clients who didn’t have agencies, obviously. You know, they would have $500 to do the commercial.’

It was this early exposure to the business that got the young creative ‘interested in the process.’ As his career progressed, King became a partner at Minds Eye, where he stepped into writing corporate training videos and documentaries on top of local commercial work. ‘It just was a natural evolution that I would [end up] directing them,’ he explains.

King’s work at Minds Eye was key to helping the company grow and, as he says, ‘we eventually worked our way up to where we were doing major documentaries and dramas. And along the way, we started getting bigger commercial gigs.’

At first it wasn’t easy selling the agencies on allowing King to direct the higher-budget boards that started coming Minds Eye’s way.

Says the director: ‘For a while we were bringing in directors because the agencies wanted that guy from Toronto or whatever. But eventually I managed to get [an agency job], and it went from there.’

The first such spot King helmed was for SaskTel, nearly seven years ago. In fact, King estimates ‘probably 80% of everything [he’s] done [has been for] Crown Corporations.’

Having spent his entire career with Minds Eye, King has also directed features, dramas and documentaries on top of his commercial work. ‘It’s Saskatchewan, right?’ King begins. ‘As a director in this province, if you wait just for features or documentaries or whatever, you’re not working a lot.’

The director, who ‘would prefer to be doing more long form,’ also ‘likes the commercial stuff, because first of all, as a partner [in Minds Eye], it really helps pay the bills. But from a creative standpoint, what’s fun about commercials is you get in and you get out. That’s a refreshing experience.’

King likes to concentrate on ‘the story side of a commercial.’ Describing himself as a ‘generalist,’ he points out that ‘we haven’t done a lot of comedic stuff here [in Saskatchewan].’

The idea of spending an entire career with one company may seem foreign to most commercial directors in other Canadian production centres. King says he has had ‘opportunities to go elsewhere,’ but has always declined. ‘I have been approached by some agents and I’ve always put that off. Because, you know, you commit yourself to a company and you kind of dream of where it’s going to go. And you hate to bail out on that dream, even though personally, your career could be moving more quickly, [elsewhere].’

Saskatchewan, in all its expanse and glory, maintains other pulls on the director. He is excited by the fact that he is intimate with his crews and has the opportunity to work with ‘largely the same dop [Ken Krawczyk]’ from shoot to shoot.

King explains the advantage: ‘You have conversations, when you’re not working, about things you’d like to try. So when something comes up, you say, ‘Remember that thing we were talking about that night over a beer? We could use that in this spot, right?’ ‘

Another advantage of the Saskatchewan production scene is the relaxed atmosphere on-set. ‘The crew is kind of like a family,’ King says. ‘And there’s a lot less stress. I know people who come in and work with us from Toronto and Vancouver. They say it’s just so much more relaxed [in Saskatchewan].’

If King has any problem with the industry it is that he feels ‘the whole business takes itself too seriously. You can still make great commercials with the opposite attitude,’ he says.

All in all, King believes ‘it would be nice if some of the bigger stuff from out of province came here. It can be done cost-effectively here and we have the talent here. We basically built the industry here up from scratch. We learned how to make it cheap to begin with, which always means more creatively, and that knowledge is still worth something. Never mind the fact that people would be really excited and keen [to work on an out-of-province job]. And that kind of energy is hard to buy sometimes.’ *