signs on at Circle

Ascribing a quality to the spots on director/cameraman Jim Weiner’s reel is simple, and so is the style of the shooting.

It’s all about a commercial place where the pictures remember they’re there to enhance the sales message. Simple.

Weiner, an American who’s just joined Circle Productions from Toronto’s Stripes, has a reel reflective of his double life – part lived and worked in Canada, and part in the u.s.

Actually Weiner, who comes from a long line of photographers and artists, has a triple life. He’s also a closet cowboy, much taken with the quality of the light in the Southwestern u.s., with poet cowboys, fourth generation ranchers, native Indian causes. His career in stills photography has taken some tangents with trips through this part of the world on projects he’s initiated. And he says in much of his current work – whether on still or moving pix – he looks to recreate the texture and feel of that light.

Stills photographer, yes, but no stranger to advertising. After graduating from Pasadena’s Art Center of College and Design, he worked as an assistant to celebrity photog Douglas Kirkland on jobs with the likes of Bette Davis. With that ‘wonderful experience’ in his vest pocket, he returned to his home town of Chicago to shoot for ads. From there, moving to directing was ‘a very easy progression,’ he says, and a gratifying one. Compared with stills work, where you might produce one good image in a day, ‘the opportunity to make all these pictures in a day and to have input as to what images will be used…is wonderful… They untethered me after years of photography.’

On his reel, a Motomaster spot for Doner Schur Peppler leads. It tells an easy story with bright colors, relaxed smiles, landscapes, and up, down and around camera work. You can see the benefits of the stills background with the active camera. To finish, a puzzling, mildly amusing encounter between a North American lost in the desert and a desert local trying to set him straight in a sea of sand.

Below the 49th parallel we go with a cute Kroger shoes spot guaranteed to persuade young jocks that philosophy in books pales beside the faultless logic of a rich basketball player. Open with a few erudite phrases (and slightly formal pix) from the voice-over and matching supers to identify the authors. Enter the salesman du spot, nba basketball celeb Joe Dumars. You don’t see him, but the camera gives us his moves, takes the player-goes-to-basket pov. ‘Dribble, dribble, dribble,’ says the Dumars v/o, evidently referring to the opening quotes from yer Machiavelli and Goethe, to name a couple. The voice resumes: ‘Fake left (camera swings right), fake right (camera swings left), shoot…swish.’ Then Joe – or at least we think it’s Joe – puts his shoes up, feet crossed, soles toward the camera. And up comes the Kroger logo.

Next is a questionable one, creatively that is. Very prettily shot in blue-gray tones and tints, it’s for an American outlet mall. Woman in dusky apartment looking piqued by bills. Voice-over tells us ‘they’ take too much, give too little, as the woman moves around her couch. Then, with a breathtakingly long-legged kick of a paper shopping bag, she sinks into the couch and looks renewed, especially in sort of three-quarter profile. The wailin’ blues track and strong v/o are fab and the direction is flattering.

Back in Canada, a spot for Backer Spielvogel Bates for Hyundai Elantra. Again, the kinetic camera, twisting and turning along the roads, allows some news on the car spot modus operandi. This car can do all that, it makes you wonder. But just as you’re sure you might only be able to test drive it over rugged terrain, there’s a very deft dissolve edit from the ‘outback’ Elantra to the ‘out-front’ (driveway) Elantra. Shot near Drumheller, Alta., the spot features the light quality Weiner craves and shows it off no end.

Finally, an example of dialogue. (Weiner says he’s just done another featuring pga golfer John Daly.) Here’s this woman, talking on the phone about the disastrous family dinner the night before when she’d tried to substitute healthy food (a fish) for the usual fatty comfort fare normally carved on these occasions. The exceptional thing about the treatment of dialogue in this spot is that you might actually be able to imagine yourself saying most of it, and speaking as the talent does.

That’s why the light comedy touch is perfect here with no search for guffaws, just a little grin of recognition when she realizes they really could have had a low-fat ham. Great pucker on her face, good pacing, few visual distractions and a message with a bullet. Weiner has allowed for calm dissemination of the sales pitch. Maybe you can exude more calm when, like Weiner, you’ve survived a harrowing house fire and bad burn and given yoga a place in your life. The Weiner motto couldn’t be more appropriate for ad work: ‘The flexible shall inherit the earth.’