"Tell me your sins," says the padre. "I like to watch things," laments the sinner. "How about grown men and women naked on their hands and knees wearing masks and squealing like pigs?" questions the priest. "Do you think you would enjoy that?" "I do think I would like to watch that," affirms the confessor.

Created for the Seattle Film Festival, this scene in a confessional is the perfect balance of comedic timing and visual aesthetic for Propaganda Films director Dante Ariola. "I like to watch" was also the first of many collaborations between Ariola and DP Salvatore Totino, both from Brooklyn.

"Dante's one of my favorite directors to work with because he's very creative," says Totino. "He's always trying to push the limits. Every time you work with him he just keeps growing."

Intrigued by Ariola's concept for the film festival, Totino volunteered his time to shoot the spot. "I read Dante's idea and thought it would be great to work with somebody new," says Totino. "It got a lot of notoriety and from there we did some other work but much later on."

Ariola went on to film commercials for Volkswagen, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Adidas and ESPN. Five spots produced for Budget in 2000 earned the director a Gold Lion, a Clio and "Best Campaign" at the AICP Awards.

This year he received a nod from the DGA with his nomination for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials. One of the spots recognized by the Directors Guild was Nike "Elephant" out of Wieden + Kennedy.

Shot in Budapest, it opens with an elephant lying on the ground barely breathing. The carnival atmosphere borders on the absurd as members of a Hungarian circus surround the fallen beast. In a moment of desperation, they look to actor Dominique Pinon who declares, "I'm a human cannonball not a doctor!" A passing cyclist breathes air into the animal's mouth, she rises. "Why sport?" reads the tag. "Healthy lungs."

"It was tough because the elephant would only lie down for about 60 seconds at a time," recalls Ariola. "So we'd have to lay it down, get all the actors in and then get the camera down. We had about 30 seconds per take. And with Lance Armstrong trying to stick his face in the > < elephant's mouth, it was intense."

Subtle and left of center, Ariola's comedic sense governs his choice of commercial projects. "I don't mind things that are humorous so long as they're not gags," explains Ariola. "If you came away from ['Elephant'] and you didn't laugh but it was kind of amusing, then I like that. That's what I mean by choosing a board that has comedy and getting it in the right place."

With respect to developing boards, the director adds, "It has to be on the page to begin with. Then you can try to take it a little bit further. You can't put perfume on a complete pig, if you know what I mean."

In HP's "Ticket" through Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an Englishman goes to great lengths to treat visiting Japanese businessmen to a football game. Efforts to obtain tickets land the group in jail. For future reference, tickets can be purchased online and printed out in the comfort of one's home.

"I've been accused of being an Anglophile," says a smiling Ariola, "but I'm really not. I think it's because I love British advertising." The director admits he was concerned the humor in the HP spot may have been too broad. But it is reconciled with the uncovering of a juicy detail. "Unbeknownst to HP the actor was just in a Peter Greenaway film. It's a story of incest between a father and son," reveals Ariola. "I don't think they knew about that before the spot came out."

Ironically, Ariola was rewarded for the broad humor in his Budget spots "Propulsion" and "Aromatherapy" for Cliff Freeman & Partners. "The guy with the jetpack gets killed so it makes it OK by me," reasons the director. "I think it would have been too comedic had you done a cutaway of him in the air going up. Once he took off it was one shot, in-camera. I got offered a lot of really broad comedy after that so it really took some discipline to turn it all down."

Two spots for UK telecommunications company one2one proved to be the most challenging for Ariola. The filmmaker recreated its trademark theme song using everyday sounds and effects like a moving escalator and the siren from a fire truck. "Those were insanely difficult because I actually got into composing the sound design. I shot on DV with wild sound and then tried to come back and compose the song and work the pictures back into it." Ariola lived in London for two months while working on the project with BBH. "It made me insane at the time, but I did like it in the end."

"My best foreign experience was the FIFA stuff," continues the director referring to the governing body of world soccer. Three spots out of London's HHCL will air during the World Cup in December. Shot on location at sports arenas in Rio de Janeiro, Prague and Shanghai, the spots are part of a global campaign intent on establishing the FIFA brand.

"FIFA comes up with the rules of how soccer should be run," comments HHCL's head of TV, Richard Packer. "So basically, they have policies concerning anti-racism, and three points for a win. The concept was to show people the rules and where they came from."

"We're not selling anything, we're just telling you how it's done," adds Packer. The same can be said of Dante Ariola.

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