"We've done a couple of bits and pieces for books before, but nothing like this," says Gary Thomas, creative director at Toronto post house Crush Inc. Their latest work is a series of three clips commissioned by Random House in Canada to bring to life the words of Generation X scribe Douglas Coupland's new novel The Gum Thief.

Each of the clips was conceived, planned and shot by the Crush team, but as Thomas explains, it's not often they get the chance to get behind the lens.

"Primarily we're post and animation, but we do shoot," he explains. "We don't often do these complete self-produced pieces. It's something all places like us are getting more and more into now, where you have to do everything. I think it's harder now to be a purely post or design place. You've got to actually be able to do some shooting. And we actually kind of like doing it too. It's a little bit more fun."

The clips were created over the course of a week with small teams working to give them a handmade feel. For Crush the process was liberating and a marked change from working on traditional commercials, although Thomas admits that some spots proved a little trickier than expected;

"The toughest one was definitely the one with the staples [called Bethany]. The guys were kind of learning their way through the stop-frame world and trying to build these things as much as they could in camera. We did a little bit of colour correction to try and punch up some of the words, but we wanted to keep them as unmolested as we could."

Our Hotshot centres on The Glove Pond, a novel featured within Coupland's own novel. Its story is told using vintage magazines and old books, with the extract brought to life within their text.

"Glove Pond is kind of a jokey thing," he says. "Douglas was saying that when he was a kid he saw 15 minutes of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and it stuck with him. Within the book [the character] Roger goes to community college and decides he wants to try writing a novel. He's also seen that 15 minutes of Taylor and Burton so the book is his attempt to write a story along those lines about this couple whose heyday was around 1970."

And what about the man himself? What does the mind behind the lines think of the clips? "There are no rules," Coupland told shot.net "We are all pioneering here and I think we're going in the right direction. I love them; I think they're small works of art and stand on their own."

"It's exactly the kind of thing he does even in his own art installations," says Thomas. "He does these installations that are a mixture of sculptural things with a lot of mundane objects so he does a lot of that stuff on his own. That was one of the things that he liked. We'd sent out some style boards really early on and he really warmed to the whole concept. He really got into it. He's a cool guy."

To view the spot click here.