I met Jim Fiester in the summer of 1992. I was trying to make a go of it as a TV commercial director at a Chicago film production company. To that point I had written and directed a feature film, Victimless Crimes, starring Craig Bierko (Cinderella Man, Boston Legal) and more recently I made a 75-second film featuring the performance artist Denny Dent painting a giant portrait of Mick Jagger, http://www.dennydent.com. I was using the trailer to the film and the Denny piece as my commercial reel and was getting no offers.
One day that summer Jim came into the studio to be the DP of a commercial another director was about to shoot. As I was the only one around we began to chat. Jim asked me what I had done so far and I showed him “Denny.” Without missing a beat he said, “Cut that to 30 seconds and you have a TV commercial.” I argued that I couldn’t cut it to 30 seconds, maybe 37 if I was lucky. Jim said, “Look it (a favorite phrase) I have an editing system at my house come on up and let’s try. We will know very quickly of it will work or not.”
Two days later I was at Jim’s house in Lake Forest re-cutting Denny on a VHS AB-roll editing system. Two days after that we did an on-line edit of a 30 second TV spot that ended up being a series of commercials across the US and Canada.
Jim and I have been working together ever since.
To see the finished TV spot as well as some of our favorite TV commercials visit http://www.windycine.com/film.html
PeterH
