Many directing teams are born when two directors with little to no experience get together to make themselves a more viable option for creatives looking to fill a job. Indeed, two novice heads are sometimes better than one, but it is unusual for two established directors to hook up. However, that’s what Imported Artists directors Dale Heslip and Richard D’Alessio have done.

Under the team name Jerry, the two Toronto-based commercial directors combined forces to shoot a pair of visually engaging :30s for Fidelity Investments through Publicis smw. Both have upwards of a decade of commercial directing experience and both have stated they could have shot the spot on their own, but acknowledge the results would have been much less impressive, not to mention the extra time and expense that would have been involved.

‘Dale and I had been talking about actually doing jobs together for three or four years,’ says D’Alessio, arguably Imported’s most celebrated Canadian talent. ‘We had never had the opportunity for a job to present itself that had a perfect set of variables to sort of go for it.’

‘This was the first job that came along that actually made sense for a collaborative process,’ says Heslip, whose Short Man Brown ad from last year placed in the top 10 of Playback’s Top Spots competition. ‘It just seemed like it was the right kind of thing as an idea, but the idea wasn’t baked enough. It needed some developing and we were the guys to develop it.’

The two agreed to shoot the job for Fidelity and Publicis creative director Duncan Bruce and copywriter Aubrey Singer. Working with little more than a script, D’Alessio and Heslip embarked on a shoot that literally took them around the world. With a squad of 10 guys (which included the creative team and Fidelity’s Brian Henderson), the directors embarked on an 18-day commercial shoot that took them from Toronto to New York City, to Rome, to Tokyo and back to Toronto.

‘Fidelity is this huge multinational corporation that is working around the world, so they wanted a spot that communicated a global feel and a spot about people working around the world for you,’ says D’Alessio. ‘That was the visual mandate they gave Dale and I. Then it was up to us to visually demonstrate something that would say that, but at the same time do something that was a bit of a signature piece for them so they have a really distinctive campaign.’

With the seemingly constant flow of new business-related and dot-com advertising, Jerry was intent on making the ads different from what is currently on the tube.

‘Every company out there now is doing the world message,’ says D’Alessio. ‘There isn’t one telecommunications, investment firm or dot-com company that isn’t telling you they are around the world. The hardest challenge for us was to find something that would work in that realm and still feel global, but somehow cut through and make it a signature piece for Fidelity.’

The spots they set out to make feature a businessman walking, it would seem, from city to city as imagery of the cities seems to circle around him seamlessly. Making this happen was no easy task, according to the directors. Hampered by poor weather for much of the time on the road, the two had to work fast to get the shots they needed at each location and remain on schedule.

‘The most time we had was in Tokyo, but it was the only city we weren’t that familiar with,’ says Heslip. ‘In New York we knew where we wanted to be. In Rome we had an idea of where we wanted to be. In Tokyo we had an idea of where we wanted to be, but neither one of us had been there before so it was the toughest one to explore.’

Looking for iconic architectural shapes to shoot in each city they visited, the two found it useful to sometimes split up. For example, after some unforeseen rain washed out shooting in Rome for a day, Heslip stayed behind while D’Alessio moved on to Tokyo to scout locations.

‘[We reasoned that] we wouldn’t be wasting time on the schedule because if I went ahead I could potentially save us the day, and that is really what happened,’ says D’Alessio. ‘We actually wound up gaining a day on the way back and shot some stuff in Tokyo that we anticipated shooting here, which enabled the whole post end to work out a little bit easier.’

With dop Simon Mestel shooting in every city and Ayxz’s Peter MacAuley editing constantly on the road as soon as new footage had been shot, using the Final Cut Pro program on his laptop, the job was rushed but never derailed. In the Jerry caravan, everyone reportedly pitched in, regardless of rank or salary.

Although some trouble-shooting had to be done in each city, time was saved thanks largely to some tests that were done before Jerry even left Toronto, which proved to get all of the imagery at the right level – as it virtually circled the actor.

‘We knew going in what the lens height was because we tested it,’ recalls Heslip. ‘We had to figure out just where the lens and camera would sit so that all these streets would line up. We wanted to create the illusion that if you put the camera on the corner of King and Bay, you’d have the cibc building on one corner, the Coliseum [in Rome] on another corner, Tokyo on the other and New York on the other. We had no idea how difficult our job was going to be. It was like a math project. We didn’t know exactly where we were going to be because we couldn’t pre-scout it.’

With the material captured, Jerry traveled back to Toronto and met with their actor. The team placed the man in a ‘green room,’ that is to say, a room that was completely green screened, and shot him walking in circle. They later added in the footage from the international cities they had traveled to, which had already been cut by MacAuley while on the road.

D’Alessio and Heslip are very forthcoming about the Fidelity job having been the best time either of them has had as commercial directors. Jerry may very well ride again.

‘This was the first job out of the gate and I think the allure was it was around the world, it was a technically challenging job, and all the variables were really in place,’ says D’Alessio. ‘You’re not going to hire us to shoot two actors in a room. You’re going to hire us because it is going to be a large-scale production which seems to be almost insurmountable, and the agency is having a hard time figuring out how to pull it off. It’s not like we are going out there and outwardly marketing ourselves, but if it is the right job and the right fit we’ll do it.’ *