In a rare case of campaign sharing – creative control by spot directors and creative risk taking by a client – Spy Films’ Jeff Eamer and The Players Film Company’s David McNally recently collaborated on the writing and directing of a pair of head-turning spots for auto-info service Lemon-Aid.

Client Glen Schultz created Lemon-Aid when he purchased the rights to the publication of the same name and converted the information – pricing, road performance and reliability tests for every make of car – to a phone service. After the service began generating a significant response, he began looking at tv advertising. But when Schultz’s own creative efforts proved abysmal, Eamer and McNally were called in to deliver a viable advertising product.

‘For a new business you want something that gets past the clutter,’ says Schultz. ‘The spots they created were edgy and slightly controversial, so I handed them complete creative freedom. The results are staggering.’

Eamer and McNally, longtime creative collaborators (the pair have been working together on several feature screenplays), completed a spot each through their creative consortium m.e.a.t. The spots were produced separately out of Spy and Players.

Bringing a combined background of agency, writing and directing experience, the co-creators recognized the opportunity to go to the limits creatively.

‘It doesn’t happen every day, being able to take a project from concept to finished product; we realized we had the opportunity to push the creative envelope hard,’ says Eamer. ‘It requires working directly with the client and having the strategic and creative skills to do it.’

Eamer emphasizes the primary importance of strategic integrity in the creation of the spots; delivering a real message about the consequences of not being informed before purchasing a car. In the case of the two spots, those consequences are dire and form the basis of the two stylistically divergent stories.

Eamer’s spot ‘Heist’ follows the travails of an unsavory group of small-time screw-ups and a bank heist gone wrong, and is delivered with a dirty, Reservoir Dogs style, hand-held feel. The spot was shot by dop Doug Koch on Cherry Street after the year’s first snow storm, lending further dankness to the scene.

McNally’s more esthetic effort looks at the fate of a crapped-out Master of the Universe when the mansion is emptied, the Machiavellian trophy wife has split, and even his final bid to end the misery is thwarted. The spot was shot at a palatial house on Old Yonge Street with California-based feature dop David Franco and set against Hank Williams’ plaintive If you Loved Me Half as Much as I Love You.

Both directors share a creative philosophy of delivering strategically sound creative that has an underlying message with some human truth to leave a deeper impression on the audience.

While not every client can leave the whole spot-making process in the hands of a creatively informed director, in the case of Lemon-Aid, Schultz recognized that as a start-up, risk was a very big part of founding the business in the first place, and that risk ethic should effectively be carried over to his advertising efforts.

McNally cites the help of the two production shops on the project and says the spots were created in the ‘spirit of making the best commercial. One of our goals was to push Canadian creative, to showcase the creative we have and further the cause of what can be done here.’

The spots were edited at Daily Post, with Peter McAuley on ‘Heist’ and Chris Van Dyke cutting McNally’s ‘Cruel World’ spot.