Director Eric Yealland, who won a Bronze Lion at Cannes earlier this year for a web campaign for Canada's National Advertising Awards, has signed with L.A.-based Original for exclusive representation in the U.S. Yealland brings lengthy experience as a comedy director in Canada and Europe including campaigns for Budweiser, IKEA, Coors Light, Ford, Toyota, eBay and Coca-Cola.
Yealland said that he is eager to explore the U.S. market and calls Original the ideal vehicle through which to do so, citing the company's track record for growing directorial careers and its complementary roster of talent.
Yealland won his Bronze Lion for Focus Group, a web video produced by Draftfcb for the National Advertising Awards. The spot shows a blandly cheerful marketing professional soliciting comments from a consumer focus group about a new commercial. One of the creatives from the project, lurking in the next room behind a one-way mirror, shows his contempt for the focus group's vapid opinions by dropping his pants and rubbing his backside against the glass.
Yealland calls himself "an actor's director" and his work tends to be economical and performance-driven. His recent spot for eBay, for example, is a single set-up: a postal worker phones a woman about a vibrating package that he suspects contains an adult product. (It's a cellphone.) Recently, however, the director has worked on a few campaigns involving ingenious special effects. A spot for a milk producers group shows members of a dance class withering like balloons as they lose energy.
"The effects were all done in camera," he said. "It was all careful positioning and puppetry. We used sex dolls. We dressed them in the same wardrobe as the actors and rapidly inflated and deflated them to get the plates we needed."
Yealland began directing music videos in his early twenties and signed his first commercial contract, with Partners, Toronto, when he was just 24. He went onto direct more than 100 commercials for the company over the next decade. He is currently represented in Canada by Industry Films, Toronto.
Yealland has won numerous awards for his work. His campaign for Canada's Metro newspaper and Rethink Communications won four Lotus Awards and an Applied Arts Magazine Award for Best Campaign. He is also the recipient of an ICE Award (for a Phamachoice spot out of Extreme Group), and a Gold ADCC Award and a Silver Marketing Award (for the Playland spot Snack Bar out of Rethink Communications).
Original is led by executive producers Bruce Mellon, Joe Piccirillo and Marc Lasko.
Documentary In The Works About The Life and Death of Detroit Urban Fiction Writer Donald Goines
Who killed Donald Goines?
Producers of a documentary on the life of the prisoner-turned urban fiction writer of novels about the violence, drugs and prostitution that he surrounded himself with in Detroit are hoping the answer hasn't been lost to time — or the streets.
It's been more than 50 years since Goines and his common-law wife, Shirley Sailor, were found shot to death on Oct. 21, 1974, in their flat in Highland Park, a small enclave of Detroit. Each had been shot five times. Their two young children were home at the time of the killings.
No arrests were made and rumors swelled. Some speculated the killings had something to do with 37-year-old Goines' heroin addiction. Others nodded to the theory that the fictional subjects of his novels appeared a bit too much like the real-life hustlers, pimps, drug dealers and stickup men who prowled the city's streets.
"There have been at least a half-dozen, quite possibly a dozen, elements of speculation as to how Mr. Goines and the mother of his children were murdered," said Bill Proctor, a private investigator hired to find the killer or killers. "But no one has come forward with enough information to charge the persons responsible."
Shaking "the trees"
Proctor said a $5,000 reward being offered by the producers of the documentary might help "shake the trees" and find "someone who might still be alive or have an understanding" of the facts of the case.
Goines wrote 16 books over a short span of several years. His raw, stark and undiluted writings are filled with the urban street life imagery of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"Dopefiend," was published in 1971. Fifteen more including "Street Players," "Daddy Cool" and "Kenyatta's Last Hit,"... Read More