Scene: The final version of the spot has just been screened. The tv is black. Everyone in the room is silent. The client rep sits beside the playback machine, head in hands, doomsday look on his face.

This might unnerve some directors.

But for new directing talent Ron Baxter Smith, it’s evidence he’s done a good job.

The scene is a true story, something Smith experienced in the 18 months since he made the move from professional stills photographer to commercial director, now working out of Radke Films.

The story had a happy ending; the client was overwhelmed by the spot. As a creator, you have to be willing to take calculated risks, says Smith.

‘Unless you push the boundaries a little bit and create something new, you don’t often create something that is individual to the client.’

Toronto-born Smith has been pushing the boundaries for more than 12 years as a self-taught photographer. With money from his paper route, he bought his first camera in junior high.

It was years later that he carved out a reputation as a conceptual photographer. In between, he studied fine arts at York University and got a degree in education that led to a short-lived high school teaching career. Declining enrollment forced him to take a year off without pay, but three days after he was laid off, approval for a Canada Council Grant, which would let him concentrate on photography, came in the mail.

At 41, he looks back on a photography career that includes long-term assignments for Labatt, Seagrams, and a host of mesmerizing editorial shots for magazines like gq, Discover and Vogue in Germany. To date, his commercial spots include a promotion for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Barnes Exhibit, a Toronto Symphony Orchestra spot and an aids psa currently in post-production.

It’s a smooth transition from stills photography to directing, says Smith. The body of his stills work includes over 90 annual reports for companies like Northern Telecom. The connection between directing and photographing annual reports may seem tenuous at first glance, but in both cases you’re communicating ideas using images, he says.

‘The corporate atmosphere is a non-visual one. You use the ability to communicate an idea through film and you instill a certain amount of trust in the people you’re filming to express something that hasn’t been seen before.’

Instilling trust in the people you’re working with is key to achieving the finest quality product, whether you’re directing commercials or taking pictures, says Smith. How it’s accomplished is more an intuitive process than a formula, and it starts the first time you meet people and begin to build a relationship with them.

Someone in the business explained the importance of building working relationships to him this way: people looking for suppliers of talent look first for their image in the marketplace, second at their relationship with them, and third at the work.

‘The work has to be there or you will not have a reputation in the marketplace, but the relationship is the factor that decides whether they will place their trust in you to do a project and bring as much to the table as you can – personally, visually, and technically,’ says Smith.

There will always be people who can’t trust you 100%, especially on the client side, says the director. It’s difficult to quantify the intuition and visual sensibility which come into play in significant ways when you’re shooting a spot. Sometimes what you start out with on paper looks different from the final product, he says, using a spot he shot in the summer for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as an example.

The commercial promoting conductor Jukka Pekka Sarasate started out with the concept of water being a conductor of electricity. But the idea was that going to the symphony can transform your emotional state.

‘So I thought, why not take water through its transformations from a solid to a liquid to a gas. It’s simple conceptual ideas with strong specific lines of copy that create a fabulous product.’

The final version of the commercial, filled with hypnotizing images that ebb and flow with the music, captured high praise from the industry and the tso.

‘What was shot was entirely prudent to the budget and the board. We were shooting exactly what we intended to shoot, but when you’re going from a drawing to a visualization, there’s a huge leap of faith in any creative media,’ Smith says.