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.
Utah Leaders and Locals Rally To Keep Sundance Film Festival In The State
With the 2025 Sundance Film Festival underway, Utah leaders, locals and longtime attendees are making a final push — one that could include paying millions of dollars — to keep the world-renowned film festival as its directors consider uprooting.
Thousands of festivalgoers affixed bright yellow stickers to their winter coats that read "Keep Sundance in Utah" in a last-ditch effort to convince festival leadership and state officials to keep it in Park City, its home of 41 years.
Gov. Spencer Cox said previously that Utah would not throw as much money at the festival as other states hoping to lure it away. Now his office is urging the Legislature to carve out $3 million for Sundance in the state budget, weeks before the independent film festival is expected to pick a home for the next decade.
It could retain a small presence in picturesque Park City and center itself in nearby Salt Lake City, or move to another finalist — Cincinnati, Ohio, or Boulder, Colorado — beginning in 2027.
"Sundance is Utah, and Utah is Sundance. You can't really separate those two," Cox said. "This is your home, and we desperately hope it will be your home forever."
Last year's festival generated about $132 million for the state of Utah, according to Sundance's 2024 economic impact report.
Festival Director Eugene Hernandez told reporters last week that they had not made a final decision. An announcement is expected this year by early spring.
Colorado is trying to further sweeten its offer. The state is considering legislation giving up to $34 million in tax incentives to film festivals like Sundance through 2036 — on top of the $1.5 million in funds already approved to lure the Utah festival to its neighboring... Read More