The Reginald Pike directing team of Ian Letts and Michael Gelfand, better known to those in the advertising biz as The Perlorian Bros., has won this year’s Saatchi & Saatchi First Cut Award for breakout Canadian commercial directors. Their irreverent work has put them on the ad map as a major new force, with spots for clients including Saturn, Bootlegger, Aspirin and Timex.

The Perlorians started in advertising as a creative team – Letts was art director, Gelfand was writer – but their partnership began long before stints at Palmer Jarvis DDB, Leo Burnett and Ogilvy & Mather.

‘We grew up together in Saskatchewan, and the town we lived in was a bit of a hippie town in the late ’60s and early ’70s,’ says Gelfand, explaining his fraternal bond with Letts. ‘I made my way to Toronto first and [did] all sorts of things. I did some work with flowers, then some mechanical work, and also some work with children.

‘Then Ian came out to visit me and he never left.’

Soon, the Bros. fell into advertising and started directing while still with O&M. Their first spots were for the Bessies and Timex.

‘We had very supportive creative directors who I think understood that the way to get a lot out of your creative department is to let people explore different parts of their creativity,’ says Gelfand. ‘That’s why they were so supportive of Ian and his sculpture-making and they let us continue to work with flowers, which we love to do. And they let us explore what it would be like to oversee the direction of our commercials.’

Letts and Gelfand left the agency on Halloween day last year to direct fulltime and landed at Reginald Pike, impressed by executive producer James Davis’ nurturing manner when it came to creativity and expression.

‘His mandate is to do great work and let great things happen,’ says Gelfand. ‘We are passionate about great and unusual scripts, regardless of the budgets, and I think that is James’ passion as well. All of us are interested in exploring all the possibilities there are with a 30-second commercial and all the different ways to fill those 30 seconds.’

According to Gelfand, moving from being a creative team to a directing team was an easy decision for the pair. Now, a year into their spot-making careers, neither can imagine going it alone.

‘Basically what we do [as directors] is make a lot of decisions,’ says Gelfand. ‘It is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 decisions per spot. Every little thing from the plate you put on a table, to the color of somebody’s socks, to how the actors are going to deliver their lines. All we do is make decisions and it just seems so natural to make these decisions together. The right decision seems so obvious when there are two people making it together.’

The Perlorians’ collaboration led to success at the Cannes International Advertising Festival this year. In addition to landing a place in Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Director’s Showcase at the fest, Letts and Gelfand also won a Gold Lion with Toronto agency ZiG for a Unilever spot – Vim’s ‘Prison Visit.’ How the Lion wound up on eBay, eventually selling for US$1.2 million (they say), isn’t exactly clear.

‘Winning a Gold Lion was completely unexpected and exciting, and whoever it was who put the Lion up on eBay, I think, just wanted the world to know what a great thing this was,’ says Gelfand. ‘It doesn’t happen very often that a Canadian bathroom cleaner wins a Gold Lion at Cannes.’

Gelfand also says that he and Letts do take advertising awards seriously, and find them purposeful and encouraging.

‘Maybe we put too much importance on award shows and maybe we don’t, but there’s an awful lot of negative energy and rejection in this business, so the fact that we take the time to celebrate the work every few months, I think, is worthwhile,’ says Gelfand.

Also represented by Biscuit Filmworks in the U.S., The Perlorian Bros. are currently shooting work for Travelocity in L.A. with agency McKinney + Silver. No word on what the creative is like, but if it’s anything like the rest of their reel, it will be interesting, to put it mildly.

In just a year, Letts and Gelfand have put together a collection of spots that are unique, funny and memorable. Picking one spot to call a favorite isn’t something the Bros. can easily do. Gelfand does say, however, that one of the most exciting features of The Perlorian Bros.’ reel is the blank space at the end, which represents to them the possibilities (or perhaps the eventuality, given their first-year reception) of the work to come.

‘We love all our children equally and we love all of our children we have yet to give birth to,’ he adds.