Director Ben Steiger Levine

Until recently, director Ben Steiger Levine was best known as the director who turned Montreal Klezmer-rapper Socalled into a robotic film projector in the music video "You Are Never Alone".

The video's in-camera ingenuity landed the 30-year-old on Boards' 2008 Directors to Watch list and piqued the interest of commercial producers. He has since signed with aWHITELABELproduct for US rep, Stink in the UK and Spy Films in Canada.

Two years later, Steiger Levine is experiencing his breakthrough moment. Last fall he directed his first major commercial for the US market - a Sprite spot for BBH, New York - and his "Mr. Hurricane" video for Montreal duo Beast earned him a surprise Grammy nomination. (The video lost out to The Black Eyed Peas' unstoppable "Boom Boom Pow".)

"It felt a little bit like a cross between a strange convention and a Bar Mitzvah party," he says of his award show experience. "Everyone was sitting on fold-out chairs and eating hot dogs. As soon as there was a commercial break, everyone started texting and talking on their cellphones."

For Sprite "Unleashed", which debuted during the Super Bowl XLIV pre-game show, Steiger Levine created an animatronic robot of rising rap star (and fellow Canuck) Drake and a 20-foot long trough of stereo equipment that represented the performer's inner workings.

The spot depicts Drake battling a bout of frustration in the recording studio. He sips a Sprite and and as the sticky soda courses through his body, he experiences a creative breakthrough moment. The ad's fluid camera work, in-camera effects and technical challenges are fast becoming hallmarks of Steiger Levine's work.

Boards caught up with Steiger Levine to chat about his own breakthrough moment as well as the making-of "Heavens to Purgatory", his music video for Canadian indie band The Most Serene Republic.

The last time we spoke, you said one of your goals was to raise the level of creativity in Montreal's local commercial scene. Have you made in-roads in that area?
It's difficult to single-handedly revolutionize the world of advertising [laughs]. I've been lucky to some extent in that I was a little slow to start, but [working in the Montreal scene] put pieces on my reel that had my personality in them. Now people expect that there's going to be a little bit of quirkiness that comes into it. For example, I'm getting scripts asking for one, long take or playing with sets in a fun way. But [in a smaller market] it's a little tricky to push it totally wild.

The reality is that when you have a smaller market [like Montreal], the client is more geared toward pleasing the status quo. In a really big market there's a desire to do something really risky and flashy on certain high-end products.

Can you tell me about The Most Serene Republic video? Where did the idea come from?
When I do most of my pitches on videos, there's an element - either literally a sentence from the song or something in the cover art - that I try to tie-in. The Most Serene Republic had this rainbow-colored motif on their album - like a color gradient from pale to dark. That idea of a color wheel was in my mind: I wanted to do something with color and the repetition of color. The idea began with the band performing while wearing different colored clothes until we go through this full cycle of color. That developed into having multiple versions of the band in this space and then it developed into "OK, now how do I pull this off?"

I was also interested in 360-degree cameras that were coming out. So I thought we could put the band in a room and drop one of these 360-degree cameras in the middle. The cameras create a real-time collage of images by filming many angles at once and then all the scenes are pasted together. It's kind of like what they have for Google maps, they have them now for moving cameras but the resolution is really low.

We filmed the whole location using a fixed camera. We filmed about 60 different plates of all the action. We filmed the singer in his chair and the band members in their various positions. We also got empty plates of the room, which were projected into a sphere in post-production. Essentially, we created a virtual room with all the live textures projected against the walls in the virtual room. The camera movement was totally built in post.

The graphic color palette in "Heavens to Purgatory" was inspired by album art.

Steiger Levine used a 360-degree camera to create a virtural room in "Heavens to Purgatory".

You've used a fluid camera movement repeatedly in your work. What do you like about it?
I tend to gravitate toward long shots and shots that linger. When I first fell in love with cinema, there was something about that technique which I loved in Orson Welles' stuff, especially his adaptation of Kafka's novel, The Trial, and the opening shot of Touch of Evil. There's something about those long, long takes that I've always found really exciting. That's something you find in Hitchcock films too or even Coen Brothers movies: this sense of not taking an audience away from a sequence unless you want to give them a specific bit of information by cutting to a specific character's dialogue that you want emphasized.

For me, it creates more tension and a desire to stay and watch through to the end. It creates more anticipation or suspense and the viewer stays more involved.