On the 22nd of February I jumped ship from another project to resume work on a Canon TVC. This commercial was shot in Hong Kong right on New Years Eve December 2009. After production had concluded, I remained in Hong Kong for the New Years Eve celebrations and then traveled to Singapore for the Offline. Over the next few days, VHQ Singapore looked after the Offline edit through editor Corrine Yong, and One-Light/ Final Grade with Corey Spykerman. The Offline was then presented to Client via ECD Hiroshi Yoda (Dentsu Beijing)  back in Beijing.

A break in works commenced as I began work on a documentary project and for the next month, VHQ began to slowly Online the TVC in my absence.

On the 22nd of Feb, we re-grouped in Singapore to finnish the TVC. Swee Aik  Khor was my Online Compositor, who slowly replaced the Hong Kong skyline with mountains and a more appropriate vista! The 3D team headed by Eric Gambini, created a 3D EOS 5DMKII Camera and a Canon Legria HM31 Camcorder plus hundreds of photo frames that represent the high quality image sequence that the camcorder can produce using the same technology that’s found inside it’s professional EOS stills cameras. Over that week, VHQ worked pretty hard to meet our deadline, which meant delivering a Master by Sunday the 28th of Feb. On the 27th of February, we stepped into AMX Studios, off Bukit Paso Rd Singapore. and David Ong mixed and Engineered Jonathan Lim’s Score.

Shooting Gallery Producers Freddie Kee & Leollyne Teng put together the shoot in Hong Kong in record time. Daniel Wu was only available for a certain amount of time before he began production of a major motion picture film in China with Kevin Spacey. That meant that the shoot had to occur with very little preproduction lead up. Amazingly, directly after Christmas, we shot the commercial. Daniel was fantatsic to work with again. I had previously worked with him on another Canon TVC shot almost a year earlier. That time I had suspended Daniel from wires, using a Hong Kong Wire stunt team. This time, we were asking him to ride a horse at high speed! Luckily for me, he’s a great guy and doesn’t mind mucking it out! Because the weather was a constant threat and it was the height of winter, the shoot had to be quick. That meant fast setups, lots of fast rigging and plenty of large scale movement across a large disused land fill site. We quickly changed from dolly shots, to hand held (using an easy rig) on a tracking vehicle chasing Daniel riding his horse. Then back to static camera shooting Green Screen shots. The day was action packed and we had to complete everything before the light fell or it started to rain! Adding to the complication were all the special effect requirements. The sequence of images that form on one particular shot involved a complicated locked off camera shot. Daniel and the Horse would then ride through at high speed. The Camera was then released from the lock-off and traveled on an arc through the line of imaginary images left behind Daniel. The ground was so rough here that it was almost impossible to get a smooth track with what we had and the given time. Still the idea is strong and I think it works.

The Hong Kong production team were really excellent again. Mostly they were the same team I had worked with a year a go, so I felt very comfortable working with them again. The combination of the locals and the small Shooting Gallery Team from Singapore were very efficient. In addition to the film crew, we also had horse wranglers, two horses, tracking vehicle department, and a large Agency team. Actually one of them, John, took it upon himself to act as the rain guardian and spent quite a bit of time directing the clouds with his arms! Luckily we completed the shoot and made it safely back to Singapore.

Back in Singapore, the filming continued. In the Shooting Gallery Studio, we completed the product shots on a purpose built S board. Raman is an in house set constructor and all round “fix it” guy who is just amazing to work with. His brain is wired to think logically and cleverly solve production problems, using anything available to him. On this job, his task was relatively easy but he did it with incredible speed and flare!

After a long day on the 28th, we “Mastered” the TVC and it was done! All in all, I’m happy with the outcome. There were many limitations placed on us while making this TVC. Firstly we had to film everything in Hong Kong – there aren’t too many places you can recreate the wild west in Hong Kong! Secondly, the weather was not in our favour! All things aside, I think we managed to produce an interesting spot for Canon.

The TVC can be viewed here. A making of video can be seen on Vimeo here . Enjoy!

After finally making it back home for a couple of weeks, back in Melbourne, I have been able to catchup with family and friends but also process many of the images I have captured around the world.

When ever I get the time, I try to do some time lapse photography. I’m not entirely sure why, I just felt that it would be a good idea to do a little here and there to form a collection of sequences that could be used on commercial projects etc. Lately I have been thinking that it’s a shame these images aren’t out in the open for people to see. So I started to collate them onto a timeline in Final Cut Pro. With no real theme or purpose, I started to formulate an edit based on a music video style approach and realised that a theme did exist – The World in Motion. For what it’s worth, here is my short film, made entirely out of time lapse I shot on my 5DMKII, using a 24mm Shift & Tilt Lens, 50mm f1.4 Canon Lens, 24-105mm Canon zoom & a 15mm Canon wide angle lens. I used a Canon TC-80N3 Intervalometer to control the camera. The camera was nearly always mounted to my Manfrotto Tripod. I say nearly always because rarely I did do some time lapse with the camera sitting on a box or chair etc.

I use MPEG Streamclip by Squared 5 to assemble the images into a Quicktime movie. Generally I use Apple Prores 422(HQ) as the codec. I then edit the footage inside Apples Final Cut Pro. I will make a note though, when ever possible, I try to shoot with a ND8 filter on so that I can set my exposure time to something close to half a second. It depends what the subject is but generally I try to shoot some where between 1/8th – 3/4′s of a second. This is because I generally don’t like the crisp, sharp time lapse that creates a very rigid staccato movement. This video unfortunately has quite a lot of this which works OK but generally I prefer the softer look of the blurred movement. Knowing what level of blur is acceptable is really the key to doing great Time Lapse work.

This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the footage I’ve shot, however in the future I might consider editing the rest into another short. Incidentally, the music is composed in Garageband by yours truly. Mostly loops with a smattering of Midi instruments. Finally, all the images you see in this edit were shot in 2010 from January through to March. Hope you enjoy it.

To watch the movie see it on Vimeo.com here or click any of the above images.

I wanted to do something with the 5DMKII footage I shot in Hong Kong over New Years Eve and decided earlier to sit down and edit it. However, like all creative processes, the job always seems easier at first and then grows exponentially! Copyright free music was my problem. So I launched Logic and started composing a piece of music especially for this short video. But what genre of music? Which instruments would sound right? Luckily I had recently bought a few discs worth of samples so I spent the next few hours creating a soundtrack for my short film. Finally I could actually start editing. I knew already that I wanted to edit in a Music Video Clip style, so I began to cut the images to the beat of the music. The footage I had shot was all shot in one night – New Years Eve 2009/2010, in Central, Hong Kong. I didn’t actually know where the fireworks was going to take place and had taken a MTR to Causeway Bay. There I walked along the shoreline towards Central, where I chanced upon the perfect spot to film the event! There were easily half a million people around the Harbour, maybe even more as the fireworks exploded overhead. Although the fireworks display was quite short (around 15 minutes), the display was spectacular!

The 5D MKII’s strength is definitely it’s low light capabilities when shooting HD Video. It’s still recording in 30FPS which is annoying to me, however hopefully in February we may see a firmware update that will solve this. I also used my brand new 50mm f1.4 lens, which afforded me 2 more stops of light I wouldn’t have had otherwise! This lens is amazing. Very sharp and and at f1.4, produces the most perfect Bokeh. As well as shooting HD Video at 1920 x 1080, I shot quite a lot of stills in RAW mode. Later I combined these stills using QuickTime7 (on Mac OSX 10.6, it’s buried in the Utilities folder for some reason). I also shot several Time Lapse sequences using a Canon TC-80N3 controller. All the sequences including the 5D HD Video footage was converted to the XDCam (1920 x 1080, 30fps 35mb/sec VBR) codec. This made editing a lot more pleasant in Final Cut Pro. I didn’t spend any time on a Grade, so the final images you see in the video (minus the effects of re-compression) are as they were shot! In a perfect world, I would spend more time with my setups when shooting, but given I only had a few hours to film the event, I’m happy with the result. Enjoy! The video is uploaded to my Vimeo account. You can access it by clicking on the image above or navigating to http://vimeo.com/user735977

While I was working on a new Campaign for Canon in Hong Kong, I became aware of a “Making Of” video that was constructed from our last adventure with Daniel Wu. That Commercial entitled “Smart Choice” featured Daniel Wu running across the pages of a “flipping book”. Shot in a studio in Hong Kong almost exactly a year ago, the commercial utilised specialist Hong Kong Wire stunt experts, who hoisted Daniel to great heights in the studio. The production Company was “The Shooting Gallery Asia” and Post was taken care of by “Blackmagic Design” in Singapore. They carefully removed all the Green Screen elements and wire rigs, compositing the final images into a hybrid 3D/2D environment. You can read more about what Blackmagic Design did for this TVC here. The Commercial can be found here.

Here is the Making Of, kindly supplied by Dentsu Beijing. A quick note, this Making Of is one of the most watched “Making’s Of” for a television commercial in China!

On boxing day 2009, I boarded a flight to Hong Kong, headed towards a new Television Commercial project. 2009 was one of those strange years for me that hummed along quietly & occasionly faulted! What I mean by that is work simply stopped! So my motivation to rip myself away from my family & go directly back to work so soon after Christmas was fuelled by my desire to start the new decade off with a bang! We actually shot the commercial two days later which is amazing! With two horses, a famous Hong Kong TV star & a day of pretending we were out on the badlands of the wild west, we filmed action sequences that looked pretty cool! More on that in a future blog entry!

Regional Group EP Shooting Gallery Asia - Freddy Kee

Because my Post Production started four days later in Singapore, I decide to stay in Hong Kong for New Years Eve rather then face 16 hours of flying to and from Australia! Having no idea where to go for New Years Eve in Hong Kong, I decided that the harbour area would surely have a fireworks display and a countdown?! Google didn’t really offer to many clues where and Hong Kong Harbour is pretty big! Any case, I ended up down at Causeway Bay and walked along the shoreline towards Central. Amazingly I arrived at the Exhibition Centre, just at the mouth of the bay at Central to find the perfect position. By 11pm, the place was so full of people that you couldn’t move around. Somehow I lucked it in and found the perfect position. There, I watched an amazing countdown and fireworks display to herald the new decade!

TV Producer for Shooting Gallery Asia - Leollyne Teng

I’m now in Singapore Post Producing the TVC. This will take about a week, departing Singapore on the 10th of January. A crazy schedule will follow a short stay in Melbourne though. I have just signed up for another massive road trip that will take a small crew round the globe! This will commence on February the 1st and end on the 1st of March!

Hong Kong City Skyline

Recently, I was in Hong Kong to Direct a television Commercial. While I was there, I took some time with my friends from Shooting Gallery Asia (Singapore), Freddy and Rachel Kee, and wondered around Hong Kong. On the 2nd of Feb, we explored Lantau Peak at the far end of Hong Kong Island. There, we took a Gondola to the top of the Mountain where a huge Buddha has been erected. While the scene is very commercial, and dense with tourists, it’s still interesting to go and see. The Gondola also allows you to see the huge Airport that has been built to service Hong Kong.

We wondered through countless streets lined with billboards and signage. It’s hard to believe that any of these signs are at all effective! Shopping is very cheap in Hong Kong. Even though the worldwide recession is ringing in our ears, there are plenty of shoppers combing the stores stalls for bargains! I had to visit the Computer Center known as the Golden Computer Arcade which had very cheap CF cards for cameras and very cheap portable drives. Clothing is also incredibly cheap. A found a jacket that costs $4000 Australian for sale for just $150!

We also visited an area known as “the Peak”. The famous Cable Car tram ride takes you to the top of the Peak, or you can drive up as we did. Here there is a spectacular vista of Hong Kong. It’s truly breathtaking how large Hong Kong is from here. While I wasn’t able to do so, I believe it’s the place to spend a Dusk/Night for an amazing photographic experience. Here are a few shots from our visit.

On the 3rd of February, I shot a new Commercial in Hong Kong. While I can’t say for what, the shoot involved filming Actor Daniel Wu, performing amazing physical acts with the aid of a Hong Kong wire stunt team. For me, having shot these types of physical effects before with my friends in Melbourne, it was very cool to now shoot in Hong Kong with the real deal!

The team from Shooting Gallery Asia traveled with me from Singapore with all their equipment (camera, lenses etc). The local Hong Kong team consisted of Elvis Cheong (line producer), Tony Lam (Production), Ah Tong (Gaffer), Little Four (Stunt Coordinator), and a bunch of others – I’m sorry I don’t have their full names. In total, the crew was quite large in the end. I think their were at least 5 stunt crew! In any case, the crew was fantastic to work with and very efficient considering that many had never worked together before.

Daniel Wu was fantastic to work with also. A consummate professional and a dam good bloke! We spoke at length about technology and camera equipment so there was plenty of common ground. He handled everything I asked for perfectly and enjoyed all the stunt action also! The wire team were great in assisting him where needed. Several of the shots required him to jump so high that he nearly touched the Studio ceiling!

Completed in under eight hours, the shoot was very smooth and lots of fun. The Shooting Gallery team and I spent a small amount of time looking around Hong Kong which was cool. It’s a huge town if you have to work in it. It’s busy, noisy and smelly at times but has a fantastic atmosphere. The shopping is outrageously good – some of the cheapest clothing and electronic goods I have seen anywhere! Off course you need to be careful with Quality Control but that’s to be expected. I will write a Blog entry on the tourist stuff later! Enjoy!

Like everyone I guess, I’m concerned about the recession that has rocked the financial world recently. With a young family to feed, being a filmmaker these days doesn’t seem to be the best business decision one could make, however miracles do happen and January 2009 has proven to be an exceptional anomaly!
After a fantastic break up at Daylesford in country Victoria, I rushed back to work on the 4th of January. For the next two weeks, Artisan Films produced a special project for the Australian Navy. On Friday the 16th of Jan, I witnessed the master for that project go to HDCam. By Saturday afternoon, I was on a flight to Singapore. The 8 hour trip meant I arrived after midnight Singapore time. 6AM Sunday the 18th, I was up and ready to travel to Hong Kong for a quick business meeting. The meeting took place in a hotel in downtown Hong Kong and lasted for about an hour! Then it was time to board a return trip back to Singapore. That flight took 4 hours! I’m now writing this back in my Singaporean friends house, knowing I need to be up at 6am this morning to have yet another business meeting here in Singapore. Later today, I will board a flight back to Melbourne, where I will see the family for a few hours before boarding yet another flight to Christchurch New Zealand! Yep it has to be the most crazy schedule I have ever witnessed! I will update this blog along the way, however for now, I need some sleep!