In two slushy, gray days in February, a team assembled by Apple Box Productions is gathered at Applied Innovation in Vaughn, north of Toronto, to put together two commercials for Purolator Courier’s purolator. com service. The spots are to be humorous glimpses at office high jinks, the likes of which every working schmo has experienced.

Before shooting begins on day two, l.a-based director Gerald Casale (repped in Canada by Apple Box) is playing a game of pool, waiting for rehearsals on the second spot to begin. The creative team from Palmer Jarvis ddb – senior art director Rich Pryce-Jones, art director Bryan Banman and writer Brent Wheeler (senior writer David Chaivegato isn’t present) – is busy playing video games on Banman’s Sony PlayStation.

Meanwhile, upstairs, dop Dylan MacLeod and a team of special effects technicians are putting the finishing touches on the boardroom set, while Clare ‘Cash’ Cashman, Apple Box’s executive producer on the shoot, looks at footage from the previous day.

Back downstairs, Casale accidentally sinks the eight ball, but his spirits are still high. He says day one went very well. ‘We got everything we needed and more,’ says the director. ‘We actually shot variations and got shots that weren’t even planned, which is rare. It’s hard enough to get what you set out to get.’

Pryce-Jones says the Palmer Jarvis creative team wanted to create unfortunate office situations people could relate to. ‘We came up with scenarios that seem to be fairly easy tasks people still take some degree of effort to actually accomplish. Whether the incidents have happened full-blown [to viewers] or not, people understand.’

One of the ideas they settled on was someone trying to change the water cooler, only to drench his pants and draw dirty looks from coworkers. The second, being shot today, involves a board meeting and a dysfunctional chair. As a man sits in the chair and tries to adjust it to his liking, it launches him into the woman sitting on his left. Both spots are followed by info on how using Purolator online will make a day at the office easier.

‘It’s a comedy approach where in each spot a hero is subjected to some sort of awful office accident,’ says Casale. ‘These really bad days are contrasted against the ease and satisfaction of the activity of Web shipping with Purolator. The tension begins the spot with humor at a victim’s expense – classic humor – only to be resolved by the happy ending of shipping on the Web.’

Casale says he took the job for a number of reasons, one of the biggest being Palmer Jarvis.

‘I’ve worked quite a bit in Canada over the last two years and found Palmer Jarvis consistently has the most fresh and cutting-edge creative concepts and some of the better clients available today,’ says Casale. ‘What any director loves is to collaborate with smart writing and a strong visual concept, to have something you’re excited about.’

Casale says although he has only been helming tv spots for three years, he has been directing professionally for the better part of two decades. As one of the creators of the rock band Devo, Casale began his directorial career shooting the band’s music videos. He estimates he shot 20 Devo clips in total. He directed videos for various musical acts in the late 1980s, before a stint at MediaLab in London, Eng. When he returned to the States with a desire to shoot videos and move into spot-making, he recalls being turned away by commercial producers who believed his background in music videos was not adequate training.

‘They [various producers] thought by being a video director you really didn’t have your craft down, when actually quite the opposite is true,’ he says, in defense of himself and his peers. ‘It’s much more ambitious, more involved, and it is open-ended. There is more of an auteur model for directing videos, whereas commercials are so highly collaborative and corporatized in the hierarchy, the director is only asked to do a tiny bit of what they can do. People hired you and they don’t even get their money’s worth because they don’t seem to want it.’

Pryce-Jones says they knew Casale was their man when they saw his treatment.

‘He is a really thorough guy,’ says Pryce-Jones. ‘A reel is one thing, but the treatment is also important. Casale had the same idea of where the spots should go and had it very buttoned down in terms of all the details.’

He adds good comedy directors are sometimes hard to come by.

‘I think comedy is a difficult thing to pull off well,’ says Pryce-Jones. ‘A lot of directors see a funny board and want to play it funny and direct it funny. Comedy is a pretty tricky thing, so when you look for a good comedy director they are few and far between. They’re out there, but it is one of the hardest things to do, letting the idea come through without trying to make it funny.’

Back on the boardroom set, things are progressing nicely, with the exception of the rigged chair, which tosses the actor a little too far forward. As the effects folks begin modifications, MacLeod checks the lighting and the six actors get into makeup.

The success of the second spot depends greatly on the effectiveness of the rigged chair and the actors’ reaction to it. Casale instructs the actors on how to react, as further adjustments are made to the prop.

‘These kinds of ideas are based in reality and are supposed to look completely natural,’ says Casale. ‘It is a big challenge not to make it look too stilted or wooden or too stylized. Something that appears quite simple to the viewer is quite complicated to create. It’s funny how much work goes into making something look so simple and real, and the way you do it has nothing to do with simple or real.’