My Biggest Lesson: Evan Bourque
“He makes videos for commercials and stuff.” – Evan’s mom.
She’s not wrong.
Evan Bourque is a director who fuses his exceptional skills in performance, dialogue and quirky characters to deliver masterful and unexpected comedic spots. With an emphasis on nuance, Evan mines the humour that lies within offbeat moments of humanity. Hailing from Canada, he draws on his background in cinematography to infuse his films with cinematic visual flair for clients including Geico, Squarespace and Western Union.
Evan won Silver at both the 1.4 and YDA awards for his latest piece ‘Igor Loves His Car’ and was shortlisted across three categories at the 2022 YDAs for his previous film, ‘Hammr Time’.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned in my career is how powerful a good spec commercial can be for building and establishing yourself as a commercial director.
I’ve made four in total - each one acting as a significant stepping stone. And being a spec means I had complete creative control of each project, which gave me the freedom to find my voice as a director while also building my reel. It’s been a while now since I’ve made one but I still apply the lessons I learned back then to my commercial work today.
When I was first starting out I was filming unscripted social content for anyone who would hire me. It was a lot of run and gun content and I’d be operating the camera. After doing that for years I was starting to feel a bit stuck. I had lost my passion for cameras and lenses and wanted to work more with actors and dialogue driven concepts but I knew no one was going to hire me unless they knew I was capable; so I set out to make a fake commercial.
The first dialogue scene I ever directed:
A good friend of mine, Caleb Ford moved to Vancouver to pursue a career as a DP around the same time that I was trying to shift into directing. We were in similar places in our careers, creating a lot of social media content for brands but we both wanted to make commercials.
Caleb had a family friend who owned a farm. They said we could film there for free, so I started writing concepts that took place there.
I wrote about five different ideas before landing on the one we filmed. Once I had a script done I hired a friend to act in it and another actor from Craigslist. We rented a few lights, borrowed some gear and went to work.
We had a loose idea of how to execute it but we didn’t do any storyboarding or blocking - we just showed up and started filming. I remember one of the scenes needed a light above the actor but we didn’t have enough stands (or people) so I had to hang from the rafters in the barn while holding a light above the actor while directing him. It was very unorganized but it’s a great memory and I still use it in my portfolio today.
I’m in the rafters holding the light in this scene:
At that time we didn’t have many (or any) connections in the commercial world so it was just Caleb and I feeding off each other and supporting each others goals - I tried to support him in his DP journey and he supported my directing endeavours. It was an important support system back then and still is today.
We were both so new to commercial filmmaking so everything felt very new and exciting. And having someone to bounce creative ideas off of was, and still is, super important. It was just a very pivotal time for me; if we didn’t make that first spec and a few others after that I’m not sure what I’d be doing.
Those spec projects taught me how to work with actors and crew in a director role. I hadn’t directed dialogue driven scenes before that, so it was important for me to learn on projects that didn’t have paying clients.
They also allowed me to develop my own distinct style. That was one of the most beneficial outcomes. Having a distinct voice as a director allowed production companies and agencies to see the type of work I wanted to be doing which then helped me land more of that kind of work. Years later, I’m very grateful to have won silver at the Young Director’s Awards and the 1.4 Awards for work that continues to reflect the style I established back then.
