Someone once said the two hardest forces to work with in show business are animals and children. No one around these parts is too sure who coined that cliche, however, we are certain it was not director Larry August.

Repped by Toronto’s Maxx Productions, the Detroit-based August is becoming known for his talent in working with children. On the latest psas for Performers for Literacy, currently airing nationally, August displayed his abilities to charm a roomful of children and produce a product that satisfied both the client and the agency, Due North Communications.

The spot is the handywork of the Due North creative team of copywriter Stacey Allison, art director Kathryn Nero and creative director Karen Howe. The 30-second spot features a crowd of kids with an average age of eight, sitting in a circle, sharing earnestly much like a group of recovering drinkers would at an aa meeting. At the end of the spot, it is revealed that whatever affliction these children have in common has caused a major change in one little boy’s grades.

‘They went up,’ he says to finish the ad. They are, of course, talking about the habit of reading. This was the goal of Howe and her team: to make sure the psa was less about the organization and more about promoting the joys of reading to kids. And what better way to reach potential young readers? You got it – through television.

‘When they came to us they said they thought they wanted to do radio and print,’ says Howe. ‘If you are promoting a love of reading to children, you have to talk to children. Children aren’t listening to the radio and they aren’t reading too many newspapers. They are watching television, so we wanted to make a spot that would run on children’s programming and break through the clutter. This idea was born of that misdirect.’

Because of the limited budget, Due North offered its services free of charge. Howe knew going in that the script would be a tricky one to shoot, so finding the proper director was imperative.

‘This was a tall order to shoot that many children and that kind of dialogue. It had to ring true,’ she says. ‘It couldn’t be like words were being shoved into the children’s mouths.’

Enter August, via Maxx executive producer Harve Sherman. According to Howe, the two thought highly of the script and vowed to put a crew together.

‘The actors strike was on then so Toronto was crazy with all the American production being up here,’ explains Howe. ‘Crews were going at double time, so to find a crew that would donate its time for virtually nothing became something we were really worried about.’

Sherman managed to find a production team willing to donate its time for the cause. It included dop Rene Ohashi and Blue Highway’s Andy Attalai, who posted the spot.

With the crew lined up, August shot the psa in one day, saying everyone involved worked so well and so efficiently, he was able to excuse the child performers at 3 p.m. Anyone who has ever walked in on the usual commercial set madness has to recognize this as an achievement in its own right.

‘We had basically shot the whole commercial by lunchtime,’ says August. ‘We did do a little bit after lunch, but I knew from having worked with kids before that with this kind of intense work, once they had had food and ran around we had pretty much pushed it as far as it would go.’

Working with this batch of very young thespians posed very few problems, August insists, and the kids had little trouble keeping each take fresh.

While working with kids is something August has grown accustomed to, he had never worked with so many at once. His strategy? Let the kids be kids in-between takes.

‘We would shoot a take and then I would purposely let them explode, chit-chat and laugh and have three or four minutes of relief in-between each take,’ says the director. He gave different kids different lines for different versions. The end result is a mixture of the different versions.

August also wanted to give the spot a bit of a documentary feeling. A long dolly track was constructed in the gymnasium where the psa was shot. He and the crew rocked the camera back and forth, hoping to achieve a bit of a rougher feel.

August and Howe agree that the success of the end product is due to the casting of the kids.

‘If you’ve got kids who are mature, that want to do well, who get it, who are gifted, who you are not beating it out of and who can give you what you want, they are the right kids,’ says August. ‘If you are trying to get something that the kid does not want to do or isn’t capable of doing, that’s when you run into the terrible problems.’ •