If you're a fan of cinematic technique, it can be interesting to note how a film director will handle a short narrative, as is the case with commercials. Below is a list of four directors who have experience filming both feature-length films (or documentaries) as well as commercials. There are big-budget Hollywood players as well as indie directors.

Michael Bay

Michael Bay is known for being at the helm of huge-budget, Hollywood blockbusters such as The Rock, Armageddon, and the Transformers franchise. However, he got his start doing commercials for Propaganda Studios (home to other future directors, such as Simon West and Zack Snyder). Some of his work included Got Milk ads, sneaker commercials starring Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, and an ad for Bugle Boy jeans that featured cowboys lassoing running lawyers (in place of bulls).

David Fincher

Fincher is known as a perfectionist. His films include Fight Club, Zodiac, and Gone Girl. They display impeccable framing and lighting. Like Bay, Fincher worked at Propaganda Films making both commercials and music videos. He has done work for Coca Cola, Nike, and Levi's. One of his Nike commercials, "Speed Chain," was an award-winning spot that featured wild animals (jellyfish, snakes, and horses) as well as humans and trains racing across a desert landscape. The commercial is a great example of how Fincher utilizes FX. Much like in Panic Room or The Social Network, he uses virtual camera shots to get shots that would have been impossible with regular camera work.

David Lynch

David Lynch is famous for his idiosyncratic masterpieces Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive. His style is not very mainstream, but he has done quite a bit of commercial work. Much of his work has been for fashion lines. One of his most iconic commercials was for Calvin Klein's Obsession. The commercial for the perfume became so popular and iconic that it was parodied by shows like SNL and imitated by other perfume companies. It was a highly stylized, black-and-white commercial featuring two models with a voiceover reading of a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

John O'Hagan

O'Hagan started off doing short work at NYU. He then made the feature-length documentary Wonderland, which was a slyly comic study of Levitown, Long Island and its inhabitants. He has brought this same sense of humor to his commercial work. For a Denytene commercial, he had set up a sweet meeting between a "bubble boy" young man and his girlfriend. The scientists and parents stood by when the protective seal was lifted. Before the couple embrace for the first time, the father hands the young man Dentyne. He chews it, but a spray of blue liquid splatters the girl and the wall when he bites into the gum. The young man stands stunned as the scientists and parents have him put back into the bubble. The girl and his parents look disappointed, and the scene smash cuts to a promo for the "intense liquid blast" of Dentyne Ice.

For a Toyota commercial, O'Hagan had a young woman drive up to a roadside gas station. The man in front of her is getting into his car and is obviously trying to impress her. He forgets that he never took the gas pump out of his car, and so when he drives off he causes a chain of events that explodes the gas station. The young lady is left to drive off, but she is fine because the commercial tells us that the Toyota has a "legendary MPG" so she can make it to another gas station before she runs out.