Recently I received a package from Genustech, a manufacturer of camera equipment including filters. They sent me their new “Eclipse ND Fader” to try out. Playing with new gear always excites me so I set about testing the ND Fader against the original Genustech filter I had bought a few years back. My original version is an 82mm thread size , so its a bit heavier then the new Eclipse 77mm.

My Original Genustech ND Fader with Markings ending up underneath the lens

Clearly though the construction of the new Eclipse ND Fader is lighter in weight then the original but without sacrificing durability. Playing around with the Eclipse I was quite excited that they had improved the range the Fader’s “light cutting” ability without sacrificing on quality. To be slightly more clinical about my tests, I threw up a Macbeth ColorChecker and a Focus Sharpness chart and went about testing. The test results can be seen via this PDF report I prepared here:

Effect of changing the depth of field by setting the Eclipse to Minimum and then Maximum

image demonstrate the range of the Eclipse from No Filter, at Minimum and then at Maximum without changing camera settings

What my results ultimately show is that the Eclipse will slightly warm up the tone of your image, but only by a small amount. In my tests, very little Green or Magenta was introduced into the picture, which can make Post correction difficult. Since I generally don’t mind warming skin tones a little, I found the Eclipse to be excellent for imaging people. Overall I’m very happy with the new Eclipse ND Fader because of the improvements to the quality of the glass, the reduction of “colour cast” and continued attention to Sharpness. Of particular note are the Markings on the side of the filter, which are now in a better position for normal operation. They are incrementally marked in one stop indexes approximately and the markings did mostly conform to what I was seeing in my viewfinder. I found that the range of the filter allowed for 7-8 stops of difference between minimum and maximum. Off course you can go further then what is indicated as Maximum but I highly recommend that you don’t. Shortly beyond maximum you start to venture into an area where the filter will produce undesirable results. While I didn’t include it on my test results, I did find that there was very little difference in colour cast across the full range of the filter which was nice to see.

The Eclipse will cut your light input initially by about 2 stops at its minimum when compared to no filter at all. So you will need at least 2 stops of light above your base exposure to use this filter. Given that I use this filter mostly in outdoor scenarios during daylight hours, thats not a problem. Up until recently, Ive been using a 10 stop filter made by Lee Filters to shoot time lapse footage. Now that I have the Eclipse I’m more likely to use it instead as its far less restrictive. For instance I can dial the Eclipse to minimum, set my framing and then dial it back down by 8 stops to shoot long exposure time lapse. With the Lee Filters “Big Stopper” (10 stop ND) thats not possible. To be fair its a fixed ND! The only way I can pre-frame my shots with this filter is to physically remove it from the lens, set my framing and then return it back to the lens. There’s always an inherent risk of bumping the framing doing this so its not an ideal way of working. The Eclipse will solve that for me which is great!

The overall build quality of the Eclipse is excellent at a price point far less then the more expensive Heliopan and the ND Faders made by Light Craft, making the Genustech ND Fader excellent value for money as well. Another major plus for me is the availability of a lens hood that works for the Eclipse ND Fader. Many other manufacturers don’t provide what I believe is an essential piece of equipment, aka a way to kill glare and lens flare! Genustech do have an option to buy a rubberised hood that can extend in three stages to protect against flare. It works by screwing it onto the front thread of the Eclipse ND Fader. Obviously this can restrict the maximum width of your lens size (vignetting) but does at least provide some way to control light hitting the front element. It also helps to protect the front element of your lens/filter when you transport your camera from location to location. Many other manufacturers don’t even include a front thread on their filters, so using a third party lens hood is almost impossible.

Using the Eclipse to shoot Long Exposure Time Lapse with a Konova Rig

I was told that the Eclipse will sell for (RRP) US$165.00 from the 5th of December 2012. That makes it one of the best value for money ND Faders on the market in my opinion. For more details about the Genustech Eclipse ND Fader visit http://www.genustech.tv/home/eclipse-nd-fader for more information.

Its funny how you remember things some times but my next job allowed for a very quick break back in Melbourne. Only, I spent much of it in pain as a tooth of mine had to be crowned! It seems typical that my body should break down after coming home to relax, but at least I could go see my family dentist. Barely had it healed enough to eat solid food and I was off again, this time to Singapore.

Good friend and long time collaborator Senior Producer Leollyne Teng at Shooting Gallery Singapore had sent me a script for the ANZ bank‘s launch into Asia. The script was very familiar to me, with strong connections to my own HP work as well as having been based on creative developed in Australia. The Australian TVC’s looked very much like HP’s “hands treatment” originated by Goodby & Silverstein anyway so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that much of the creative had come full circle. There were differences though, namely the entire Actors head was to be in view where as the HP idea revolved around the hands only, cutting off the head. Leollyne had actually sent me two scripts, one for “Platinum Card” and the other for a more “Premium” credit card product that was to be newly launched. That version was dubbed SPB (Signature Priority Banking). Australia doesn’t have this “Premium” credit card probably because anything “Premium” in Australia means “Expensive”?! In any case, it was a nice opportunity to design a new look and feel for this product. Obviously it couldn’t veer too far from the overall look of ANZ branding but it had to stand out from the “Platinum Card” version somehow.

I flew to Singapore in early February and immediately began a series of Agency and Client meetings. I met with CD Mohan Prabhakar and Copywriter Juliana at Agency TBWA Singapore where we started the process of discussing how we could provide a premium look and feel for the second script. Both Mohan and Juliana were keen to try to extend and go beyond what was already created in Australia but I think they came up against fairly sizeable internal resistance. Much of the script was already fixed by the time I got to Singapore, having been researched, approved by Client both in Singapore and in Australia. It left very little room for me to contribute artistically, in a way that could utilise my filmmaking skills to communicate more clearly their offer. Its a common frustration for Directors I feel that limits what we can bring to the party in terms of experience. None the less, I was happy to help TBWA Singapore and their creatives to push as far as we could for innovation and creativity! Just to be clear, TBWA and ANZ Singapore were fantastic to work with. They were both super supportive and great people but as with any global companies, where control lies elsewhere, the unseen forces are often the killer to passion. So the initial work involved extensive testing with Post House Blackmagic Design Singapore, trying to come up with a rendering style that looked “Premium” but still lay close to the ANZ style set in Australia. Version after version was rejected on grounds that it ventured too far from the ANZ style set in Australia. It must have been more frustrating for Mohan and Juliana then for myself because eventually Mohan moved on to other projects. … and so the process went on!

This blog entry should highlight to others how the process of Advertising really works. I think its important to showcase how things really are, in a way that could help others in the future. So much of our work is collaborative and derivative its often difficult to define the individuals contribution. In fact, as time goes on, the role of the Director is questionable at least with its traditional definition of the word. In the past, Directors were hired because of their leading work, design skills, story telling ability and so on. However as business has sought to place guarantees on Clients money, removing the variables has been the order of the day. So everything is researched to death these days, work is revised over and over again by different Copywriters, Creative Directors and so on that no one actually has ownership anymore! By the time a Director is hired, a fully researched and approved storyboard has already been produced! Now I do have relationships with Agencies where this scenario really doesn’t apply but on the whole it is true! The fear of the unknown is so great that often the Cast is already set in stone as well. Removing any element of possible failure by collective consensus seems to be the goal! Off course its not just Directors that suffer, creatives inside Agencies must be equally as frustrated. Much of it is driven by marketeers and business people and I guess the result is that a “no mans land” is created between the worlds of Creativity and Business. Its important to understand that I’m not directly referring to this current assignment but pointing out key issues that are common industry wide!

Finally we arrived at a new look that everyone was happy with and we began the preproduction phase of our job. From TBWA, Art Director Joel joined the production. I had spoken with several other freelance creatives in relation to this job along the way however for now the team appeared to be settled. On the 21/2/2012, we began filming at Shooting Gallery’s studio in Singapore. The first day of our two day shoot was focused on the “Platinum Card” script. I utilised the same techniques I had established on my HP Commercials, making use of Vision Mixers, Monitors and a helper animation for our Cast to follow along to. The “Platinum” script was very dense with script moments and required a great deal of focus on timing, accurate positioning of our casts hands, eye line etc. It was very technical as usual but also required a great performance. Our cast for that script luckily was up for the challenge! He understood the process very well and after several takes, we shot a performance that everyone liked. Because it had to be in one single take, checking for accuracy of hands, timings etc was critical for the animation to work latter on. The Shooting Gallery team luckily is very experienced with this form of production and helped to make the process very efficient and fun. Having the team from Blackmagic Design on set was brilliant as well. Good friend and editor Tammy Quay was on hand to cut the TVC on the spot with her assistant Claire Ang. Using a portable FCP setup, we presented an offline at the end of the day! Client and Agency were very happy!

Day two was more or less the same thing but different shit as one could say! Not to belittle the work, since this day was all about the famed “Premium Card” script but the process was largely the same. The difference lay in the style of performance, some “helper objects” that we employed to help our new Cast member visualise the 3D world around him and the more relaxed timings. Our cast did find the role difficult and I spent a lot of time working with him to work through his performance requirements. In many ways because the script was far more relaxed, he found it difficult between the transition moments from one plot element to the next. Its always a thing to recognise on set – where are those awkward moments you know are difficult to kill later in post production! Its made especially true of one shot commercials where every breathing moment of the TVC is out in the open for scrutiny. There’s no shaky, shallow depth of field techniques to hide behind in this style of direction unfortunately. You can’t just cutaway to some meaningless “artistic shot” to cut out the dead spot in performance, staging or framing. However, despite the struggle, our cast did produce a performance that everyone was excited about. Client and Agency once again viewed our Offline on set and went home very happy!

Post production began at Blackmagic Design Singapore …. and then the news! VHQ had bought Blackmagic Design Singapore – not the hardware company but the Post House! It happened right in the middle of our ANZ job! As you can imagine this did make things awkward for me. I had specifically sold in a Post House because of their experience with my HP TVC’s, particular expertise in animation, colour grading etc etc and now I had to support the change. To be clear, I’m good friends with the team at VHQ Singapore as well and have enjoyed handling Post Production with their team on numerous occasions. Initially the takeover appeared to be more of a merger of talent but it became clear that this was not the case. Many of the original BMD team were leaving, including our key animator, compositor, Post Production Supervising Producer and so on. Luckily we had BMD members Derri Ng, Colin Foo, Tammy Quay, Claire Ang and Vincent Yoe staying with the project, at least to its end. Changes still occurred and Daniel Wong replaced Leollyne Teng, Senior TV Producer from Shooting Gallery. She had to leave the production at this point as well. From the Agency, TV Producer Yanti Sannie (six toes) also had to depart on another assignment and was replaced by Freelancers Jamal Paiman and Shareen Thumboo at various stages, while creatives Joel and Juliana were swapped out with Regional Creative Director Gary Steele (TBWA\Whybin) and CD Hagen de Villiers (TBWA Singapore).

All the changes took place because this job took nearly 2 months to complete! The sheer length of time made it difficult for everyone. I think by the end, I was the only consistent team member that saw the project all the way through! It did place me in a position where I was defending earlier team decisions, living with changes made by others along the way! While the results are fine, my vision for the project was thoroughly diluted by the end. It became a project management job and less about designing, creating and directing unfortunately. Still I did enjoy working with everyone along the way. Each had a unique angle and inspiration to contribute but we were all boxed in by the situation. So I would happily work with them again, hopefully under different circumstances. I certainly made some good friends on this job!

If I didn’t write down the turn of events on this job, I’m not sure I could actually write about this experience at all! Glossing it over with a cleansed version would belittle my true contribution, dedication and involvement in complicated environment. There is so much to be learnt from a project like this that to not share it is withholding valuable learning experiences. Not long after we thought that the project was going to finish, it became apparent that the Client wanted to repurpose the “Platinum Card” version and create another TVC from it as a base. That script was called “Travel Card” and was more urgent then the previous two scripts! So suddenly we dropped everything to deliver this third incarnation quickly. However by this stage we had lost Vincent Yoe our lead animator and it was to be the last job for several others also! VHQ quickly responded by putting together a team of people to help out. The Online was a whirlwind of activity and a race to complete all three Commercials. I should mention that we delivered variations of all three TVC’s to Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan which added yet more complexity to the graphic heavy nature of all our animation!

In closing, I don’t want to appear down on the process in anyway but rather share in the experience – my experience – of the extremely complicated role I had to play in this job. Watching the TVC’s you could be oblivious to the process that went towards their creation! I’m told they have performed well so they are a success.

I would like to thank the team from Shooting Gallery Singapore, the many new friends at TBWA Singapore and an extremely gracious Client in ANZ Singapore for your hard work and support.

The “Signature Priority Banking” TVC can be viewed here. I will post the “Travel Card”  and “Platinum Card” TVC’s soon.

On the 29th of December 2011, I said goodbye to my Wife and Son in Bali after having a two week break in Semnyak & Ubud. Boarding a flight from Denpasar airport, I flew to Shanghai via Singapore to begin a new project with Producer Geok Lem & Coca Cola! My previous Coke TVC was still in the final stages of Post Production and I had a very quick opportunity to catchup with Damien Yang on that at his newly formed post house VoltFX.

Without taking a breather, on the 30th it began in earnest. I had a busy day of meetings, starting with a Production House meeting, then Agency/Client meeting at Leo Burnet in Shanghai and then finally a discussion on our post production strategy with Damien at Voltfx.

The “Task” this time was to create a Commercial for Coca Cola’s range of products including Coke 300ml, 500ml, Sprite, Fanta as well as feature competition details on QQ coins (a popular Chinese alternative form of currency (deployed by Chinese Instant Messaging Giant Tencent). The TVC was to be a high energy 15 sec only, feature rising Olympic high dive champion 21 year old He Zi. As a beside, she ended up wining both a Gold and a Silver at the London Olympics which was really great to see!

After retrieving all my warm clothing (which I had left in Shanghai for safe keeping) I repacked my bags for a flight the next morning! Early on New Years Eve day, the 31st of December 2011, I flew with my assistant director Stella to Jinan Shandong China, to begin location scouting. He Zi was based in Jinan, training for the Olympics so we had no choice but to base ourselves there. Having only limited time before the shoot, I faced the fact that NYE this year would be non existent for me unfortunately. Still I had never been to Jinan before. Over that day we scoured the place for a suitable supermarket aisle and street locations as well as a high dive board for our Olympic star to dive from. Interesting note on Jinan is that it has 4000 years of history & yet you would hardly know it. There are virtually no old buildings left in the place – at least from what I saw while I was there. The oldest building was a temple near the bullet train railway station. Everything else looked like it was built from the 1960′s onwards! There was lots of construction and demolition and what appeared to me a great deal of removing the old and building the new?!  Marco Polo gives a brief description of Jinan under the name “Chingli”or “Chinangli”. It was inhabitant more then 4000 years ago, by Neolithic Longshan people, was the center of a rebellion against Kublai Khan and the Mongol rule in 1262, under the Ming Dynasty, Jinan became the Capital. Its history is incredibly elaborate and fascinating and certainly worth reading up on. However to me much of the physical evidence of history seemed to have been lost to modernisation!

Due to the large amount of construction projects, bland Soviet era style architecture and a lack of colour,  we had a tough time looking for something suitable.  We narrowed our search to a few choices but they all had issues to deal with. In any case, we missed our flight back to Shanghai due to my insistence on speaking with the Art Director and Location Managers about how to deal with each of the proposed locations. 7,000,000 million people live in Jinan and the CBD wasn’t large so we were faced with huge amounts of foot traffic walking through our set if we didn’t do something about it. I asked my team to think about ways to control the public without using barriers and visually ugly devices! After our chat, Stella and myself caught a bullet train back to Shanghai – my first experience on a bullet train! Traveling upwards of 300km/hr it took only 4hrs to blast across most of China! Not bad for the 1st day of the year!

For the next two days in Shanghai I continued with preproduction activity in readiness for the final ppm with Client. At Leo Burnet Shanghai around 10.30am on the 4th, we had our final PPM (Preproduction Meeting). As soon as we had finished, Stella and myself raced to the airport & flew back to Jinan again! There we met Goh Meng Hing, my DOP, who had just flown in from Singapore. He previously shot my other Coke 300ml TVC and a Ponds Commercial in Jakarta so it was great to see him so soon again. The next day was location surveys with our technical crew where we really started to iron out issues. The script, was now heavily stacked with offers, various products and the like and I seriously needed to work out timings. Because the script was about He Zi walking from one part to the next, the timings depended a great deal on the placement of Art Direction, her step distance, Animation Effect locations, extras and physical spaces. So I shot a test sequence with Stella to see how fast the delivery needed to be, where physical elements needed to be relative to how fast He Zi walked. The Art Director and I then sat down and worked up a floor plan for an extensive set! Later that evening, Damien Yang arrived from Shanghai and we reviewed all the technical requirements for post. Needles to say, given all the circumstances, this was quite a challenge.

The 7th of January was day1 of our two day shoot! We shot the supermarket scene because we only had a half day with He Zi! Finding a suitable supermarket with the perfect drinks aisle proved difficult in our surveys so we opted to replace all the shelving & stock at a local mini mart. The trouble was that the featured products all should have had “gold caps”, none which were commercially available to the production company! The decision was taken to replace all the caps with Client supplied ones but we had 10,000 bottles to change and only 500 caps! So the Art Department sprayed 9500 of them with gold paint.

In addition to that, many of the packs had to have new labels applied also! The result was I had only a limited time in the production day to film a complex steadicam move. He Zi didn’t have much experience on camera either beyond the normal athlete related interviews and press requirements. She had just completed another Coke TVC appearance where she performed a high dive but wasn’t required to do much more then that. So this TVC was a bit more challenging for her I suspect. My assistant Director Stella and her crew helped out enormously by translating my instructions as we coached her. I think He Zi did remarkably well considering all the technical requirements also! As you can see from watching the Commercial, it involved a very complex choreography between her actions, camera and post production magic! Given that it was only a 15 second Commercial, every moment was accounted for and thus I spent most of my time watching a stop watch, making sure she hit my timing targets! That was obviously in addition to watching out for her performance. Having Damien on set to keep a watchful eye on compositing issues was great also.

The 8th of January saw day2 of our shoot commence. We arrived early at our central Jinan mall location to construct a large set. Because of the risk of seeing thousands of members of the public watching on as we filmed, I had asked my art director to come up with a design that would essentially create an alley with high walls. The resulting design involved a large Coke Truck, billboards and a kiosk plus other bits and bobs. Those elements also carried the key messages of the TVC, which involved various promotional offers. The set worked brilliantly to keep the public out and allowed us to have a modern structure in the background. Because Jinan is so polluted with smog, my biggest fear was to end up with a location that looked into the sky! That would have been terrible on that particular day as the smog was extremely heavy, breaking records in Beijing and Jinan! So I’m extremely thankful that we chose something shiny, large and close to camera instead!

Goh (dop) had a big task of matching the lighting in the supermarket with that of the outside to help create a seamless blend. He also had to find inventive ways to light from above so that we could film everything with a 16mm ultraprime lens on our Epic Camera. We spent all day filming the most complex parts of the sequence. The finale involves He Zi taking a drink from a Coke 300ml pack and then running in the street, jumping up high and diving into a pool which magically appears just at the right time! For that we shot a background plate in the street location on steadicam and then shot He Zi performing a high dive at a nearby pool! Luckily for us, we had access to a really great steadicam operator from the USA, now based in Beijing named Rick Tullis.

We made full use of Rick’s ability on steadicam, to match shots from all the locations, as if he was a motion control rig! Off course this was only possible because we shot with a very large 5K frame, thanks to the Epic. Damien then utilised the extra area in the frame to stabilise, track and morph together the various takes, to create the seamless look and feel we ended up with. The last shot required He Zi to perform a High Dive into a pool. For that we utilised a 14 meter high crane, with a 3 axis hot head, some huge Green Screens and a tonnes of lighting to pull that shot off! With minutes to spare before He Zi’s time ran out, we completed the shoot and with that it was time to say goodbye to Goh (DOP), the Beijing based production crew and He Zi. We headed back to Shanghai with several hard drives under our arms to begin the Offline process at Attic Post. Terrence cut the TVC for me and lined up clothing elements, temporary animations, rough keys etc. just so we had a complete TVC with as many elements to show the Client.

On the 16th of January we drove out to Coca Cola’s headquarters in Shanghai to present the Offline in the “Happiness Room”! That involved getting up very early to beat the traffic but it ended up being ok due to many people being out of town for Chinese New Year. After the presentation, Attic created the EDL’s for TC. I blasted back to the hotel to organise my escape from China by posting 10kg of clothing back to Australia! I wanted to avoid steep excess baggage fees after 3 months of living in China! On the 17th of Jan I boarded my flight to Australia – It was finally time to go home! The Online continued including the music composition by Ben Rosan at the Gunnery in Singapore, visual effects with Garth & Damien at Voltfx but essentially it was done! There are often pressures from Client and Agency to change things along the way. This commercial was optimised for their needs right towards the end. Sadly because of the time and money involved in creating a single version of effects and animation, I never get to finish a Directors Cut. Maybe in the future that will change.

The Coke UTC TVC can be seen here! Enjoy!

Credits:
Agency: Leo Burnett Shanghai
Client: Coca Cola Company China
GCD: Colin Lee
ECD: Amanda Yang/Gordon Hughes
CD: Birger Linke
Agency Producer: Christine Chen
Production Producer: Geok Lem
Director: Karl von Moller
Assistant Director: Stella
Cinematographer: Goh Meng Hing
Post Production Offline: Attic Post
Offline Editor: Terence Manuel
Post Production Online: Voltfx
Lead Compositor: Damien Yang
Nuke Artist: Garth O’Bryan
Audio Post Production: The Gunnery Singapore
Composer: Ben Rosen

I found it tough updating my blog from November 2011 until now (Nov 2012) due to reasonably high volume of work and very little down time. Much of it was based in countries that made it tough to regularly blog from so I apologies to those who wanted to follow along. Its always good to be busy so I guess its a welcome situation but I do want to share with you now some of my experiences.

After completing a Commercial for Minute Maid Juice (China) with only a day to spare, I flew from Singapore to Shanghai. The final presentation, on the 25th of November, had gone very well and it was to be the last time that Damien Yang and myself were to work together, out of Post House Blackmagic Design Singapore, since that companies withdrawal from production work. Landing in Shanghai on the 26th of November, I stepped into preproduction meetings with Production House The Loft Films and Agency Leo Burnett. The script had been handed to me while I was still in Singapore and I had written a comprehensive treatment for it, adding both scenarios and enhancements to the storyline. The Agency was very receptive to my ideas and our initial meetings proved to be very fruitful. My producer, Geok Lem supplied me with a fantastic assistant director, Stella and we set about planing a multi day shoot in Beijing. On the 28th of November, Geok, Stella and myself presented our game plan, at Coca Cola’s Shanghai office. The Client was very enthusiastic and by the afternoon, Stella and I were on a flight to Beijing. Luckily, Geok had previously taken me out to Decathlon – a huge and inexpensive outdoor clothing company – where I was able to buy myself some high quality, cold weather climate clothing and shoes. Beijing was fast entering the depths of winter and temperatures during the day were hovering around the 0˚C! When we arrived in Beijing late in the evening, we received a warm welcome from the local production assistance who immediately took us out for dinner. A massive pig was promptly BBQ’ed before us and a lot of food was consumed! 

For the next few days, Stella, Geok and I visited many locations around Beijing, met with most of the crew and generally prepared for a difficult shoot. The weather was showing all the signs of becoming a problem with a huge dumping of snow onto Beijing on the 29th! To be honest, I was amazed at how different Beijing looked after a snowfall and took the opportunity to go see the Forbidden City & Tiananmen Square whilst under snow!

The TVC required a lot of background plates for a fast paced walking sequence. For this, I had been shooting plates with my 5D2 in Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. Now it was time to film more in Beijing. So Geok sent me along with a local fixer and using my slider I was able to film quite a few plates suitable for our project. The TVC is based around the concept of Chinese superstar athlete Sun Yang making his way to the London Olympic Games with a little help from Coke! So we see him relaxing with friends at a party before heading off on his journey across China and then across the world. Its a sort of visual metaphor for his hard work, to make it to the games with scenes involving him evading bad weather, the press, catching cabs, avoiding distractions while always marching forward along his journey. For me it was an opportunity to play with visual rhythm, seamless transitions and compact a lot of story in a short amount of time. I had great support from Agency creative Colin Lee, who actively involved himself into the project. Another person joining us in Beijing was Damien Yang, now representing his new company Voltfx Shanghai! He had made the switch and had moved to Shanghai lock stock and barrel and was energised to start his first real job with me on this Coke TVC. Also from Singapore was DOP and friend Goh Meng Hing, who arrived in Beijing in time to see the locations with us. Goh had previously shot my Ponds TVC for Jakarta and I truly value his expertise as Cinematographer. He could also speak Mandarin fluently which turned out to be incredibly handy. However its his creative ability that I enthusiastically embrace on each project. We think alike when it comes to filmmaking and in a logistically challenged environment like this current project, that counts for a lot!

With a large crew, cast of a many and a horrendously early start, we began production on the 4th of December 2011. The temperature at 4am was -22˚C and Geok had organised massive blow heaters, tents and good catering to keep us all happy! The first scene we shot was our London arrival scene. Shot in central Beijing, we dressed the street with bollards, post boxes, a London Cab, a Phone Box and signage to suspend disbelief that this was London in the middle of summer! In post, Damien and Nuke artist Garth O’Brien replaced parts of the shot and included “Big Ben” and other London buildings and tracked in additional signage plus other enhancements such as a hint of sun! The scene had about 40 extras milling about some of whom had to be dressed in summer outfits. One particular girl from the Ukraine wore a very short mini skirt and blouse as she rushes out from inside the phone box! I still don’t know how she managed not to freeze! At times, Damien and his team had to remove the effects of breath in freezing cold conditions to stop the visual betrayal of winter! In any case, the shoot was quite a challenge even with a huge supportive crew to help make it happen!

Still on day one, we moved up the road to the next location where an even bigger challenge awaited – the “rain scene”! Twenty or so rain towers had been setup with a long hose emanating from a large tanker truck parked along the street. The tanker still had snow all over it as it began to pump freezing cold water into the air! Fifty extras with umbrellas began to run as we follow Sun Yang along a 20 meter section of track. He is momentarily distracted by a beautiful and skimpily dressed woman who passes him by drinking coke, but soon begins to run to avoid getting wet from the rain! It was a very large scene involving a lot of work to get the right visuals since it was filmed in a very public place. The location was well suited to our needs though and provided some nice depth and realism.

After several takes, we finished that scene and moved on again. “The paparazzi scene” involved a precision “wipe” past a lamp post which transits us to a fast paced scene, where Sun Yang dodges the press to catch a cab. The camera had to land exactly in front of the Cab (a Beijing taxi) so that we could match frame it to several other Cabs in a rapidly cut sequence. At the end of day one, we shot several more cabs on the back of a low loader to complete that sequence, by driving them around central Beijing. That was another particularly freezing experience!

Our schedules for each day were highly vulnerable to weather conditions and had to incorporate the extremely short shooting day due the low height of the Sun. In total I think we really only had 4-5hrs per day of usable light! Add our location moves, huge cast, special effects requirements, weather etc and it was quite a challenge! The end of day one saw the abandonment of one scene in particularly.

Day two started with another extremely early start. We drove out to a location on the outskirts of Beijing, to a place that looked quite rural. Unfortunately the scene we shot there was eventually deleted as it felt too much out of place. Timing wise, the TVC was already jammed full and the scene really needed a lot more time for it to work. I hate cutting scenes after they are shot due to the waist but this one was necessary. The images we shot though were none the less spectacular. It was a very nice scene – it just didn’t fit the rhythm of our TVC. In the scene, we see Sun Yang walking along a country road when a tractor overtakes him. He chases after the tractor but is soon left behind. The scene was there to show the struggle Sun Yang had to face to make it to the games. A couple of images from that scene are below.

The temperature that morning was torturously cruel with a figure of about -25˚C reported by someone! In any case, we pushed through that mornings schedule and moved on to a Swim Centre where we shot the interior of Sun Yang’s arrival at the London games. At least the temperate was super warm in comparison! Typically though the pool was surrounded in blue mats and generally had the corporate colour scheme of a competing product so Geok had organised through the Art Department, to replace giant sized lengths of rubber matting with red ones! The Agency and I had pushed Coke for access to real Olympic venues since they were indeed official sponsors of the Games, however gaining access to any of the Beijing Olympic venues was almost impossible. We did shoot exteriors of the Birds Nest, Olympic Swim Centre etc as background plates but they were all removed during Post. Instead, Damien Yang was asked how he could make the Swim Centre location more “grand in scale” by perhaps including a bigger grandstand, flags etc. In post, Garth and Damien worked miracles by tracking in 2D photos of a grandstand, generic flags and adding lighting enhancements to complete the illusion. It looks great but was a lot of additional work.

The last scene for Day two was a scene dubbed “Unicycle”. Leo Burnett wanted to add a “surprising” element to the script where something unusual happened and we wrote in a scene where Sun Yang comes across some Unicyclists. I wanted to use the overlapping wheels coloured the same as the Olympic rings but again that idea was quashed for legal reasons. Somehow, later on during preproduction, that scene became a delivery mechanism to give Sun Yang a 300ml bottle of Coke. We had attempted to shoot the scene on day one in the afternoon, but bad weather had set it and the while we had gone to the trouble of setting up all the art direction, staging and dolly track, the images we shot that day were awful!

So attempt number two was very well rehearsed! Of five unicyclist, two were told to sit out to avoid legal issues. As usual what appears to be a simple scene turned out to be quite difficult as one rider was rather novice and struggled to remain in formation.

On the last day of the shoot, day three of Main Unit production, we shot the opening sequence of the TVC – a rooftop party scene! Again the weather had turned on us and was now delivering snowfalls on the outskirts of Beijing. Client and Agency had negotiated an outdoor BBQ party location for this scene, despite our concerns about weather. Several other venues had been rejected as Beijing’s trees had gone into winter hibernation and no longer looked green and much of the ground still had snow drifts from the earlier snowfall. So our location manager found an open space on a rooftop cafe that ordinarily would have been perfect. Only on this day, it was probably one of the worst places we could have been! Large snowflakes began to fall just as we began to roll cameras! Goh had to deploy large 20′x20′ and 12′x12′ scrims to keep the set free from snow, but they eventually had to be emptied of snow to avoid collapsing under the weight. the production stills show the extent of the situation quite graphically I think. Damien, during post production, had to remove falling snow flakes out of that scene and put in anything to suggest warmth! We ended up playing with the Grade, adding sun flares and all sorts of tricks to make it work.

Now would be a good time to explain something quite important. Up until now I’ve described shooting with our hero Sun Yang as if he was actually there with us all the way! In fact, we had him for only 4 hours and on one day only! Originally I was told that I could have him for a least two days but thats not what eventuated. Sun Yang is China’s leading swimming star at the moment and was very busy training both in Beijing and in Australia (Brisbane/Gold Coast) for the London Olympics. Unsurprisingly having him for more then 4 hours would be impossible. So how did we manage to shoot what appears to be a seamless one shot commercial featuring Sun Yang?? I was forced to shoot with a double for most of the time. I had designed my shots so that mostly we see Sun Yang from the side, walking and running. You can get away with a lot by simply staging however at times we had to go a bit further.

Damien Yang was tasked with the job of replacing our doubles face with Sun Yang’s! So finally when we arrived at the studio on Day3, we spent much of the day shooting the end scene in the locker room and all the elements that Damien needed to go about replacing the doubles face! That meant shooting him against green screen on a treadmill, on a chair which we used as a crude turntable to enable Damien to acquire enough angles of SunYangs face. I kept performance simple as a result to enable the face replacement to be successful but it was limiting to some degree. Incredibly I think what Damien was able to achieve is remarkable. Given our ridiculously short post period, the Christmas break approaching, Damien’s move to China and the setting up of his post house Voltfx, the weather conditions, limited shooting time etc etc I’m very proud of what we achieved as a team. I would like to especially thank Geok Lem for her support right through this production. Her knowledge and expertise guided us through the many pitfalls of producing a TVC in the middle of winter in China as well as putting together an excellent team to handle virtually any request.

The final leg of this story ends with a shift to Shanghai for Post. For the next few weeks we cut the Offline at Attic Post with Terence, graded the rushes from the RED Epic at PO Shanghai with Kit and then moved to Damien’s new digs at Voltfx. Damien and I have worked on so many projects together but this time things were different. He was operating under his own terms and I still relied heavily on his ability to deal with all the technical challenges of putting this TVC together. In many ways it required an army of post production people and yet Damien and Garth essentially handled it all on their own. That’s pretty incredible given the amount of rotoscoping, morphing, stitching, tracking and other routines they performed! So to Damien – thank you as well! What you did was incredible!

During my postproduction time I managed to go see (with Damien) Zhouzhuang just outside Shanghai which is quite amazing. They shot part of Tom Cruise’s “Mission Impossible 3″ there as its water canals are often referred to as the Venice of the east! There are quite a few ancient towns and cities that look similar in China including around Hangzhou and Suzhou but this place was quite spectacular. Finally we presented to Agency and Client and we had the approval to finish the TVC. So on the 17th of December, I flew via Melbourne to change out my bags, pick up my family and fly directly (on the same day) to Bali Indonesia for a well earned family vacation. I was still approving final renders whilst celebrating Christmas in Bali but at least the temperature was now nice and warm! Some would say extreme given I had just flown from -20˚C to +30˚C! However for the next two weeks I enjoyed being with my family before flying back to China to begin the next adventure!

Credits:
Agency: Leo Burnett Shanghai
Client: Coca Cola Company China
GCD: Colin Lee
ECD: Amanda Yang/Gordon Hughes
Agency Producer: Christine Chen
Production Producer: Geok Lem
Director: Karl von Moller
Assistant Director: Stella
Cinematographer: Goh Meng Hing
Post Production: Voltfx
Lead Compositor: Damien Yang
Nuke Artist: Garth O’Bryan
Audio Post Production: The Gunnery Singapore
Composer: Ben Rosen

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On the 15 of October I flew to Shanghai to begin production on a new TVC for Minute Maid Juice. This time we would be working on a short 15 second script created by ECD Kelly Pon and shepherded by Agency TV producer Julienne Wu from BBH Shanghai. Having worked closely with Kelly before, I really felt comfortable in knowing what she wanted to achieve in this Chinese New Year special. Once again we would film Eason Chan in Hong Kong but this time we would employ the magic of a 3D dragon to bring to life a fantasy tale especially for Chinese New Year 2012.

Production House Producer Geok Lem, arranged for my visas into China and after several face to face meetings with the Client and Agency, we flew to Hong Kong on the 19th of October to organise the shoot. We stayed at the newly opened East hotel, which I want to point out as very special. A truly remarkable hotel for Hong Kong with lots of space and great design virtues! Enough of the free plugs and more on the production process.

Several days of preproduction followed with casting and wardrobe calls, meetings with my Art Director on the set design etc. I was reunited with most of my usual Hong Kong crew which was great. This time “Elvis” was my 1st AD While Ben Sum and his team had furniture built, dealt with several cast changes and a multitude of wardrobe options.

On Sunday the 23rd of October we began production in the studio. We shot everything we could using a double for Eason, including cutaways, reaction shots and technical stuff the 3D dragon would require to interact with. Including the cast and crew, the studio was filled with people and even though we were only producing one single 15 sec commercial, our day was completely full of activity. My Cinematographer this time round was legendary Hong Kong based DOP Oceanic. He’s a long standing professional, who is deeply respected by the local crew which definitely made my life easier. His eye for lighting was similar in style to my own which made conversation easy. Of note is that I asked him to employ smoke on set. I did this because I’m often concerned about how sharp and clear the RED’s 4K output makes things. By using smoke sparingly, we would be able to add contrast in Post Production without having such a strong harsh look.

Monday the 24th of October, we filmed an 8 hour day with our Cast and Celebrity, Eason Chan. Once again it was great to work with him. He’s a highly experienced entertainer with followers in the millions all over the world, so he’s definitely not shy! However he is gracious, patient and very supportive, especially of our younger cast members. He actively helped to make the young boy featured in the TVC, to feel relaxed and have fun!

As with many of my Commercials, the complexity of the shoot involved wrangling people’s eye lines so that Post Production could integrate a 3D character with real life. This was no easy feat! It involved a Dragon forming (made from pulp) and dancing around them.  We ended up having crew members holding sticks, toy dragon’s on booms and clap queues to help the cast to look in the right direction at the right time. I did think of using a quad copter at one stage but that would have moved to slowly, been too dangerous considering our young child actor and Eason (given his celebrity status). In addition to that, we had curtains being swept by the Dragon, a Woman’s hair being blown by the dragon and lots of confetti raining down – all synchronised with the actions of the 3D character. Off course all of this had to be timed to fit into a 15 second TVC!

Tuesday 25th of October I flew to Shanghai to begin the Offline Post Production! Cutting the RED One footage at Attic Post, Terence Manuel was my editor. Fitting everything in and imagining where the Dragon would exist was our main concerns at that time. Terence did a lovely job, helping the Client to see where the Dragon would be by animating a “lens flare” around the screen to simulate the flight path of the Dragon. We got approval for the Edit on Friday the 28th of October and went straight to Final Grade at Shanghai’s PO (Post Office). Michael Jaing graded the images beautifully, including adding a lot of contrast to arrive at a strong “look”. Because we had shot with smoke, the image did not end up fiercely sharp looking, and instead had in my opinion more falloff between colours and contrasty areas. After the grade my job was done for a while! It would be a few weeks before I would fly from Melbourne to Singapore to complete the TVC at Blackmagic Design!

The Dragon design was another important element. We actively tried to create a Dragon that was constructed from as little “Pulp” as possible. Minute Maid is China’s no.1 selling orange juice and the “pulp” is a reference to the product. In previous TVC’s the pulp “comes alive” and display character, creating a kind of mischief and playfulness around Eason as he drinks. This time, in an effort to cheer up a young boy, Eason conjures a Dragon made only of “pulp elements”. The 3D team at Blackmagic Design in Singapore were responsible for bringing this to life. Kelly and I were pretty resolved in creating a “Pulp Dragon” with as little pulp as possible. We wanted to avoid a very complex 3D, which would be difficult to animate and to help make the communication clear – not look like a hornets nest of activity etc! And yet it had to easily communicate as a Dragon. BMD rose to the occasion and designed a fantastic Dragon for us. Led by Senior FX artist Ronnie Chin, a hand full of animators worked for a couple of weeks, tracking, animating and incorporating the Pulp Dragon into our live action photography.

Music was again another key ingredient. Utilising Singapore’s Song Zu Recording Studio, Composer Lindsay Jehan created an energetic and fun track, underscoring the images perfectly. Further sound design elements were added also by Sound Designer Damien Waddell.

Meanwhile back at Blackmagic Design, Damien Yang oversaw the compositing side of things. He had to correct a few eye-lines from errant cast members, retie a few things here and there but mostly the images were clean and easy to work with. Damien as usual did an amazing job of coordinating his team and managing client changes. On the 25th of November we concluded the project successfully and I flew on directly to my next assignment in Shanghai China. Once again I have so many people to thank. I should quickly say thank you to Producer Geok Lim, who did an amazing job calmly, Kelly Pon for working so collaboratively, Damien Yang for being so dam reliable and the whole Hong Kong Production team. There are so many others not singled out here, but rest assured you are not forgotten. A link to the TVC can be found below:

On the morning of Sunday the 14th of August I flew from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, to work on a TVC for Malaysia’s Celcom, a telecommunications company. They were looking to create an exciting, visually interesting Commercial for their Xpax brand, which is geared towards young users between the age of 18-25 years old.

The TVC required shooting for 3D integration however the time frame for this job was extremely tight. With careful consideration with production house Carrot Films, I took the decision to develop all the 3D animation sequences early and have them ready before we had even shot a frame of the live action. Local post house Pixel Post KL was tasked to come up with 3D, “chewing gum style”, “Speech bubbles”, that when popped would rain gifts/prizes to their owners! That meant pre conceiving how we were going to shoot the commercial to a much higher degree of accuracy! The style of all of the previous Xpax TVC’s is MTV inspired – Music video techniques, fast cutting and moving scenes with young people, using the product in energetic ways! The colour grading on all the previous Commercials were heavily rinsed with their corporate colours of Purple & Orange.

Day one was “hit the ground running”! An early wakeup and we were off to look at various “House” locations around Kuala Lumpur! We ended up seeing four or so locations before heading back to the production office to review Casting, brief a Storyboard Artist and meet Carrot Films Producers Jefferi Tik and Lani Layali.

Day 3 was a continuation of Day one, with more location surveys. Luckily the days efforts revealed an amazing house with a very minimalistic feel and plenty of space to work in. Returning back to the office, we continued Casting, Wardrobe and Propping for the rest of the day.

On the morning of the 17th of August, I took some time to go see the Batu Caves and Temples just 30 minutes outside of KL. That was an amazing experience. I was the first person there, other then Tamil practitioners at the Temple. Before the lights were even switched on I had climbed the 1000 odd steps to the top, entered the Caves and explored the Temples inside the Caves themselves. Only Monkeys, Doves and Bats accompanied me for about an hour! Quite magical and special I think?! I spent some time taking HDR images of the subterranean world lit only by an ocular in the roof of the Cave! I witnessed a private religious event as three women rolled themselves along the floor and then had water poured on their heads. I’m not sure of it’s significance but it was quite amazing to witness!

I also drove out to see the Electronic Shops out at Jalan Pasar and several ITC Malls. In the afternoon, I returned to the Production office to go over more Casting and Set design. The Agency arrived later for an official Preproduction meeting. It was great to finally meet them.

Day4 – August 18 was D-Day for much of the preproduction work with a Client Presentation scheduled for later in the afternoon. However there was not much I could do at that point. So I decided to go with Moga, the driver, back to Jalan Pasar to explore more of that street with electronic component shops on it. We had missed a huge section of it on our original visit. Despite the electronics scene being relegated to “extreme hobbyists” there definitely is a presence of “Hackers”, “Makers” and even Professional Engineering in the air. That afternoon we presented what we had to the Client at Celcom’s head Office in KL. The meeting went very well although a murmur of change was brewing!

Day5 started with some challenges! The Client made some changes which slightly changed everything! I was handed the news and went straight away into battle station mode. In all fairness the Agency and Production House were incredibly supportive and explained that “this is how it is” with a big smile on their faces! New Cast was called for, we scrapped locations within the house, set dressings and started looking for city skyline views of KL. Although much of the original script had changed, in many ways it hadn’t! I realised this as I was working through my shot list. Much of our preproduction was still relevant. However, the Casting was a battle. Out of four original cast requirements, we had reduced it to just one! The Client approved a young Girl by the name of Chrissy but she was based in Bangkok Thailand and had to be flown in!

Day6 – Saturday the 20th – I awoke very early and was picked up from my hotel in Mid Valley and driven to Set. We began production that day with Chrissy, who had arrived at 2AM the same day, from Bangkok. After meeting her &  the Crew, Arn (my 1st AD) and I reworked our plans to accommodate the new situation. I was hugely relieved to discover that Chrissy was not only vivacious and gorgeous but very accomplished as an actress. I had no problems chatting with her and trying out different performance ideas on camera! She was incredibly energetic given her very early morning arrival into Malaysia! Eric Yeong, my Cinematographer, helped out here by lighting her beautifully and playing the role of the calm observer! The shoot went very smoothly, helped by a fantastic team from DraftFCB Malaysia, the Carrot Films Crew and importantly, the team from Pixel Post who had sent their effects supervisor along for the day.

Day7 – Sunday 21st – Again waking at 4AM, I was picked up from the hotel and driven into the centre of KL. There we transported ourselves to a helipad on the 29th floor of a city building. From this vantage point, we filmed time lapse and realtime footage of the sun dawning across Kuala Lumpur. For that we had no less then two Canon 5Dmk2′s, the ARRI Alexa from the previous day and my DOP Eric brought his brand new RED EPIC M along for its first official engagement! It was kind of crazy but we shot the “crap” out of it! Sadly none of that footage made it into the final TVC although it looked amazing! The RED Epic is so small and the low light performance is clearly a major selling point!

Day8 – Monday 22nd – At 10am, I was whisked to go see Pixel Post – the post production company handling the Offline/Online as well as the 3D requirements. Having slept for most of the previous day, after our vigorous shoot on the Helipad, I was pretty rested and keen to see the rough cut. Editor Billy, had created several versions and I was pleasantly surprised that it all worked and fitted into a 30sec TVC nicely. We spent a few hours working on it together before I had to go to the Grade! That’s right, a final grade before we had even finished the offline! The timing of this TVC was so short that I had to travel to APV (Asia Pacific Video lab) in KL to setup the look of the TVC. We were never going to be able to come back with finished pictures because we were grading the data files shot from ARRI’s Alexa and RED’s Epic directly in Lustre. The Colourist did a very nice job! After the grade, it was back to Pixel Post for more Offline before our Agency presentation at 8PM! We had a few discussions about which version to present but finally at 9PM we presented our offline’s to the Client. We were still shifting the edit during that session to fix timings with the music, find best performance etc it was so organic! We arrived at an approved offline at around 11PM that evening! I think the Creatives Richard, Brian and Dave from DraftFCB and importantly TV Producer Brandon Chai helped enormously in getting the TVC across the line successfully.

Day 9 – Tuesday 23rd – Pixel Post continued on with the task of finishing the TVC. I took a trip into the centre of KL and walked around the Petaling Street Market. Later I filmed some Time Lapse footage of the Petronas Towers transitioning from day into night before getting an early nights sleep!

Day10 – Wednesday 24th – Popping my head into Pixel Post at 2PM there was still quite a lot to be done. The grade was done, including all the new shots we added during the Client Presentation! that looked very nice. Much of the 3D was in various state of rending but I could tell it was coming together. Despite the incredible speed of the job, changes in concept and quest to stay flexible, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I should take a moment to thank the team at Pixel Post for their enormous effort. Producer Kenny looked after the project so well but their were quite  a few involved from their office.

Day11- 25th of August -  12pm I again popped into Pixel Post. Thankfully a lot of work had taken place overnight. The TVC was really starting to feel finished which was amazing. The team had worked very hard to clean up the images shot on the ARRI Alexa as well as render finals for the 3D “Speech Bubbles”. Online editor, Kitson, rushed through all the composting tasks with flare. The Agency arrived at 7PM while we were still finishing the TVC. By 10PM it was all done and the job was complete! I need to thank so many as usual but especially this time! We had so little time and this TVC was effectively produced in 4 days which is incredible! Incredible because it has interactive 3D, great production design by Leslie, fantastically coordinated by Connie and Arn my 1st AD and supported by a two excellent Production Producers. It made use of new technology like the RED EPIC M and Arri Alexa! The entire production team worked very hard but made it seem easy and pleasant – so thank you for your effort guys, much appreciated – Especially since the entire process happened during the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan!

Day13 – Malaka – got up early and drove with my driver Moga to Malaka, about 2 hours out of KL. Staying overnight, I enjoyed seeing the sights, photographing old Portuguese Forts, churches, the local food and generally touring around Melaka. A huge thank you to Moga for making that trip so easy!

On my second day in Malacca I ran into a group of young guys playing around with their cameras. They were part of a photographic club, experimenting and learning about photography with a model. I asked if I could join in and for about an hour I had a bit of fun using my strobe gear. The model was really excellent and generously gave me a few poses.

At 4PM the next day, it was time to head back to KL. After a meal at the Petronas Towers,  I quickly packed up my stuff for an early morning flight to Singapore the next morning. Touching down in Singapore, I caught up with Damien Yang from Blackmagic Design and Leollyne Teng from Shooting Gallery Asia about various up coming projects. I also managed to catchup briefly with good friend Bruce Watt for a quick social get together. After visiting a few Time Lapse locations, ITC malls I headed out for the airport again. Making a comfy nest in my airplane chair, I fell into a deep sleep and relaxed for the first time in ages!

On the 1st of September I landed in my home town of Melbourne.

The TVC can be viewed by clicking the below image:

After a couple of weeks back in Melbourne, I boarded a flight bound for South Africa to continue with post production on my Minute Maid Juice Commercial for China!

Its not often I get to fly in that direction, actually this was my first time, so I was super excited about both the job and the prospect of getting to know a new country. Flying via Johannesburg the trip was long but made easier from a business class seat! That would become important on the way home but I’ll keep that for later! For the next two weeks, I called Cape Town home and Marc Bloch did his very best to showoff all that the region had to offer. Not only that, he brought us all to his home for dinner with his family which was incredibly hospitable of him. Very early morning, Kelly Pon, myself and Marc would drive out to various sites around Cape Town and surrounding Table Mountain and shoot Time Lapse sunrises! Later in the post weeks, he drove us to the Cape of Good Hope, the Wineries of Franchek, restaurants at Hout Bay, Table Mountain and many other incredible places around Cape Town. I was totally blown away by the beauty of the countryside, the light through the mist, clouds of the Cape and the rich animal life that seemed to be everywhere. I must have exposed 250Gb+ of photos while I was there. In fact I had to buy another hard drive to cope with the mass of data!

The Online process went on during all of this. We popped in and out of Black Ginger to review the 3D, look at compositing with Flame Operator Marco and generally finesse the Online process.

Black Ginger have a large team of 3D technicians, masters and artists working for them. On our project, we were lucky to have a very skilled freelancer modelling and animating pulp, while utilising in house Nuke & After Effects compositors to prepare many of the shots for the finish compositing in Flame. It’s always great watching different Post Houses and their approach to the work load. Black Ginger is very process driven and “develops” the finished product through review, commissioning to artists and production line hand offs. It’s a “Studio” approach rather then a small shop approach and definitely reflects Black Ginger’s capability at handling large scale Hollywood epics! Not that it ever got so process driven that it felt impersonal, cold, or” factory like” but rather it felt skilfully guided by Marc Bloch and his team!

Without a doubt I fell in love with South Africa’s landscape, light and animal kingdom! I never had the time to go to a Safari Park or explore the north eastern regions of South Africa but it’s now definitely on my list of things to do. I can’t thank Marc Bloch enough for his hospitality and guidance. I had such a good time!

But all things come to an end. The two weeks were up and we did squeeze every last minute working on the final version of the TVC! Finally it was time to fly home. After saying good by to Marc, I flew to Johannesburg and was promptly grounded! During the time I was in the air, the ash from a Chilean Volcano had floated around the globe stopping flights back to Australia! My flight was cancelled indefinitely! The Airline put me up in a reasonably ordinary hotel in Johannesburg. The prospect of having to stay there for any length of time was not appealing. It was also lucky that a Vietnamese TVC project did not go ahead as I wouldn’t have made it to that job on time! So for the next 48 hours, I was grounded. Finally, the word came that we could resume flying back to Australia but unfortunately only via New Zealand or Perth! I chose the Perth route! On arrival in Perth, the Chilean Volcanic Ash problem was still a major problem! There were no flights to Melbourne directly! Instead the Airline wanted me to fly via Sydney! After nearly 4 days of attempting to fly home I was sick of it all. Finally the Airline notified us of a flight, traveling under the ash, that would fly direct to Melbourne! I grabbed it despite any inherent risks.

The Minute Maid TVC job was finally over! I took so many photos of my experience in Cape Town, some of which I have posted to my Flickr Stream. Feel free to check them out here

The Commercial can be seen by clicking the below image:

On the 19th of April I received an invitation to take part in a con call with BBH Shanghai for an up coming Minute Maid Commercial. After a quick round of discussions with both key creatives Kelly Pon and Production Producer Geok Lem, I headed for Hong Kong!

Minute Maid is China’s biggest selling Orange Juice and is one of Coca Cola’s line of products. Their current campaign had featured Eason Chan and this TVC was going to continue that tradition. Eason is extremely well known all over the world and has a large following in Asia and many Western Countries including Australia, England etc. He grew up in the UK so not only was he easy to work with but he had a larrikin sense of humour as well!

With very little preproduction time, we scoured Hong Kong for locations, eventually arriving at a spot near Clear Water Bay. A couple of days later we began production, filming the TVC with the REDOne camera. My Cinematographer was a guy I had worked with before – Atong had participated on one of my Canon TVC’s with Daniel Wu a couple of years before. This time he was in charge of all things photographic while I concentrated on Directing.

The shoot schedule was spread over two days with all of Eason’s involvement concentrated on one day. Additionally, we had a second cast member. Her name was Ella Chen – A Taiwanese pop star from a band called S.H.E!  Luckily Ella was available both days so we could overlap Eason and Ella on screen. But there were a few shots we had to use doubles!

CD Kelly Pon and Writer Jay Qian were great to work with, as were the rest of the BBH team! BBH TV Producer Bernice Wong kept things on track and coordinated a very tricky production and post production process. My Producer Geok Lem, was also coordinating a large Hong Kong crew, Australian Director, South African Post house, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Chinese and the list goes on! Our Client, Craig is American but had lived in Japan so it was fair to say that this was a multinational production!

Key to the process was Post House Black Ginger from Cape Town South Africa. VFX Producer and part owner of Black Ginger, Marc Bloch, flew to join us in Hong Kong for the shoot. He was terrific to work with and Kelly, myself and Marc would talk endlessly about the job, photography and other cool stuff! Definitely had fun with those guys!

The first day of the shoot went well but we did have rain and sun in the same day. That made life tricky for the grade. Eason and Ella were fun to work with and I had great time wrangling their performances and eyeline’s towards mythical “pulp” that would be added by the South African effects team later! Keeping people interested and focused is always a battle in a technical environment such as this but like troupers, they pulled through with the goods! The Hong Kong crew worked tirelessly to provide all the necessary art direction, set dressings and construction. The location looked amazing after they removed rubbish, high grass, trees, and planted a white picket fence, bushes and fresh green grass along the roadside. They had to build a bus shelter to help remove an ugly council waist disposal area! This was all done overnight due to the quickness of the production! When it started to rain, the Hong Kong team ordered a tanker to conduct “wet downs” for the remaining part of the shoot so that we could maintain continuity. While that slowed production down a bit, I think that the wet downs really helped the look of the Commercial.

The second day of the shoot was with Ella only. She was truly fantastic to work with. Very helpful, super nice! We shot all the wide shots of her, the car approaching and all her closeups on that day. Occasionally we had to resort to using a body double for Eason but I tried to do that sparingly. The day ended up being sunny with a bright blue sky, which was a bit unfortunate for continuity. However, we ended the shoot very positively and headed into town for celebrations.

Flying to Shanghai, China, we continued the Post Production there. Firstly was Offline at the Production House. My editor, Kathrin Schmoll ( known as Schmolly to her friends), was flown in from Germany by Kjell Kunde, EP of Tribe! She was great & we cut several options for the 30sec & a 15sec variants. I can say that Schmolly is truly a great editor and anyone lucky enough to work with her will discover this.

2 days later, we presented the Offline edits to Client on the 28th at BBH Shanghai. That went very well. The life of a freelancer is sometimes complex! I also had to cope with a Skype con call with Jakarta & Singapore for my Nippon Paint TVC “Vinilex” at the same time!! That went for 2 hours but ended with a very good result also! So I was on a high!

On the 29th, I got up early & walked around the Bund in Shanghai City! Then on to post at the Post Production Office (PO) where Colourist Kit (from Hong Kong) graded the DPX’s using Baselight. After the grade, we went to a Night Market & the Hyatt where I shot some night vistas of Shanghai! I had some time to play tourist for a few days before heading home to Australia briefly. The next stage to this saga was a long flight to Cape Town South Africa. I’ll leave that for another Blog entry soon!

On the 2nd and 3rd of April 2011, I began production of a Television Commercial for Nippon Paint in Indonesia. The product called “Vinilex” is a popular household paint which was due for a new marketing campaign. The Agency, Dentsu Jakarta, wanted to explore a bit of digital alchemy, some visual magic with their idea. Key creatives ECD Rostina P (Tina for short) and Art Director Edhya Listiani wanted to play with the “magic of colour” by creating a world where a fresh coat of paint could create joy, excitement and perhaps a dash of dare!

Working with Kemistry Films in Jakarta again, I was reunited with Producer Rini Hewitt and her core team. They included 1st AD Agnes, Production coordinator Anita Sandrayanti, Costume Designer Imelda, and Art Director Malek Prada! I had previously worked with all of them on other TVC’s in Jakarta so it was great to reunite! New to the group was DOP Ipul & Editor Ravi both of whom were really great to work with.

The TVC required a location shoot but what we wanted was quite exotic. At first I was thinking “Set Design” and a Studio based shoot but soon learnt that wasn’t going to be possible. A location scout returned with many photos from various galleries and public spaces around Jakarta but one set stood out immediately. In Jakarta, there is a tourist destination called Taman Mini Indonesia Indah. It’s a massive park filled with examples of every type of building construction found throughout the 1000+ islands of Indonesia! If your into Architecture then this is a great spot to go and visit. Deep within the complex is a science centre for schools and people interested in science and engineering. Its a huge round building with a very futuristic look and feel. It’s not well frequented by the public so they had a vast section unused which we could take advantage of.

So off we all went and visited the site! On looking around, Malek and I immediately came up with an awesome plan to build a small section of set. He drew the plans that afternoon and construction begun the next day! It was a “Guggenheim inspired” Gallery set out like a giant colour wheel! Panels would stand in spoked sections of the “wheel like” space! A curved, highly reflective door would lead audiences into a cathedral styled room that a studio set design simply would never have afforded! I loved the design and was so happy when the Agency and Client agreed to it.

Key to this Commercial was Blackmagic Design in Singapore. Lead compositor Damien Yang and his assistant Chia Choon flew to Jakarta to supervise the extensive 3D and 2D effects. In the region, I’ve come to depend on the Blackmagic Design team for not only excellent workmanship but their friendship. Damien is a master compositor par excellence! His strong sense of design and technical skill are incredibly valuable to me but its his flexibility when it comes to Client/Agency changes (and even my own) that is truly exceptional. He deals with it all so well. This job was a joy however as we had such a great on set team. Malek’s Art department team had built all sorts of rigs and tricks to help make the 3D magic go smoothly. He built “Paint Splattering Machines”, a water ramp that could dump a large amount of water onto our cast via a curved piece of Perspex to form a massive wave, painting dripping rigs, etc etc. All in all we had a lot of rigs and tricks to play with!

Casting was a huge deal for me on this TVC. We were looking for an unknown who could pull off all the technical requirements as well as carry off the humorous and fun moments. Luckily we found it in a young man called ‘Boy”. His understanding of English was limited but we were still able to communicate effectively. He had never performed before on a TVC so he had a lot to learn!

Shot on 35mm Kodak film, Ipul, my very young DOP, had a lot of cool elements to play with! The overhead domed glass ceiling would pose somewhat of a challenge to him as the sun became full strength at times! In an unconventional manner, Jakarta’s sky cleared of its drab grey clouds and spilled harsh sunlight through the very impressive ceiling! Sadly day two didn’t follow suit and we did have to rebalance shots later in Telecine. However Ipul did an amazing job dealing with the scale of the shoot and the vast space of the location.

At the end of Day Two, the main Cast had been completed and we moved on to filming many elements for 3D. Damien and Chachoon oversaw the filming of paint splats, drips, dunks, water spray etc, all shot in high speed 35mm film! It was actually quite fun to watch!

I shot the pack shot as a time-lapse sequence using my 5DMK2 in stills mode. An artist painted the Pack Shot for me on a canvas while the camera recorded each stroke as a time lapse event. Later we removed any reference to the artist so that the Pack Shot could be seen to self animate on screen!

So after a fun packed 2.5 day shoot, we progressed to Post Production in Jakarta. Robert Cook at VHQ Jakarta had graded the one light rushes for us and freelance FCP editor Ravi brought his laptop down to the Grand Kemang Hotel, where we cut the offline edits over the 5th and 6th of April. We cut a 60, 45, 30 and a 15 second which we presented to the Agency and Client on the 7th at the Cutshop Jakarta. That went very well. In fact as a result, the Client bought the 45 second TVC!

With picture locked off, the final Grade occurred on the 8th of April at VHQ with Robert Cook again. His grade was very nice and with that, we headed off to our own worlds for a couple of weeks! I briefed in the Music to KL based Composer Mike Bloemendal who’s company Imaginex was handling the Audio Post Production. The images left Jakarta and headed to Singapore for cleanup and 3D at Blackmagic Design while I headed home for a very short break.

I didn’t rest for long. As the 3D team were hard at work in Singapore, I rushed off to Hong Kong to shoot another TVC. Following the conclusion of that shoot and subsequent offline in Shanghai, I returned back to Singapore to oversee the Online of Vinilex. The team at BMD had been in constant contact with me while I was away (via Skype and email) so I was fully aware of progress. Now that I was back, we began the serious task of compositing all the elements. I arrived on the 5th of May via Hong Kong. By Monday the 9th, we presented to the Agency and mostly we were in good shape. Mike Bloemendal sent through his track of music and blew me away with his “accurate to the reference” composition! He was able to add his own elements to it but it retained the spirit and feeling of the reference track! He also managed to rope in a good mate from the USA to do the vocals which was awesome! Damien and his team at BMD had pulled off yet another miracle in cleaning up vast areas of the images, removing stray public, messy backgrounds, and conflicting colours. In a few sections, the set had to be extended or repaired thanks to our rigs. Chia Choon and the 3D team built Cars, Oranges and water elements while Damien composited them into their respective scenes. There were still some elements needing completion but by Wednesday the 11th, we presented to the Client.

The Vinilex TVC was a fun experience for me. I think I was lucky to not only work with so many very talented people, many of whom I consider great personal friends, but a fantastic agency team as well. There are quite a few names I should be mentioning here from the Agency side but shamefully I don’t have them written down anywhere! I use my blog to record, pay respect and say thank you for an otherwise thankless world in advertising. Since no credits roll at the end of a TVC I want to take the opportunity to say thank you to the Agency, the Crew, Kemistry Films, Rini Hewitt, Imaginex and the Blackmagic Team for a fantastic effort.

To watch the TVC press the following image! Enjoy!