As promised here is Part Two on the making of Carex. Part One can be reached here. This article will deal with the post production stage.

After completing the shoot in Jakarta and some basic Post Production at RedCine Jakarta, I flew to Bangkok, to go work with Mike Parsons at Chateau Post. Owned by Tony Morias, Chateau Post is a small boutique facility that offers Flame, Nuke and Shake services as well as some 3D. I had met Mike quite a few years beforehand in Melbourne and later in Singapore, where he worked at Blackmagic design. He’s a legend when it comes to Post Production, having been involved in the industry at a very early age. He’s a veteran of Flame, Flint and inferno as well as many of the now retired technologies like Henry, Shotlister and Chyron (to mention a few).

Carex offered a few interesting Post Production challenges and Mike was definitely perfectly suited to solve those problems. A boutique facility like Chateau Post is often best suited for these kinds of jobs, because they can afford more personalised time to the preproduction stage as well as assisting with the Production stage. In this instance, like other work I have Directed for HP, we produced a timing guide in the form of an animatic. This animatic had to be perfect in terms of screen time for the various 3D objects, that would be added in Post Production. Mike and I worked over the internet sending Shake Scripts at first to each other and then finally mpegs of the guide animation. This was then used during Production, to send to a large LCD that hung over the Camera. The Actress was then able to follow along with her image half mixed with the Animatic via a vision mixer. As she followed the animation along, not only were her hands in the right place, but she was kept to time, guaranteeing that the TVC wouldn’t exceed 30 seconds.

For the first week of our Online, the guys in the back rooms tracked all the footage, rotoscoped her hands and generally cleaned up stuff! I briefed Eric, a French 3D animator living in Bangkok, who then proceeded to model and animate many of the objects. During preproduction, I had taken orthographic views of Jakarta based Buses, to provide not only a guide for the creation of a 3D model version of the bus but also the textures. Eric produced a fantastic 3D bus for us using those images. The product was also turned into a 3D object. For that, Pong, the in-house After Effects and 3D Studio Max guru produced all the packs in 3D. He also designed and constructed a Manuka Flower which was animated into the end shot with the packs. Pong is a specialist when it comes to “fixing hair problems” on the many Thai Hair commercials. His work on removing stray strands is absolutely amazing. However his “pack” work was also impeccable.

Mike Parsons at this stage was compositing elements in Flame. Using an array of tricks, he helped produce the smooth transition from one effect to the next, by cleverly merging 3D and 2D layers. While we spent a fair amount of effort grading the images at CineRed, more work was necessary to produce the final colour grade. The RED camera (build 21 at the time of writing, using a Generation 1 sensor) is still pretty noisy in the RED channel. We did use an IR Cut filter to help keep the skin tone from clipping early, but I found that digital noise persisted. Mike ended up “washing” the skin of our actress almost entirely. This laborious task took time but was necessary to produce both a pleasing skin tone colour and repair the noise damage.

Music is always an important part of the post process. Imaginex Studios Jakarta had been involved at an earlier stage but due to our composers ill health, Imaginex Studios KL office took over. Mike Bloomfield (expat from Australia) took on the Composers roll and we had several Skype calls to go over what was required. Mike is awesome. He worked up a track that hit the mark and we only made small adjustments to the instrumentation. Luckily for me, McCan’s Art Director, Paul Grezoux is an ex drummer from a sydney based band. So he was able to contribute on the music post in a very positive way.

In the final week, the Agency/Client team arrived in Bangkok and we showed progressive updates to the work. Bangkok is an amazing city to work in and we made full use of it along the way. The team went out on several occasions to have dinner at the many incredible restaurants in own. During our days off, I spent some time photographing some of the many Buddhist Temples that exist in the middle of Bangkok. If your interested, you can see an earlier blog entry I wrote on this subject here. Off course we all went shopping to various shopping markets. I spent some time as I normally do at Pantib Plaza and Bahn Moh.

After several hard working weeks, the Carex TVC was complete. We presented to a happy Client and departed Thailand for our respective home countries. For me it’s always gratifying when a job ends as smoothly as it starts. This job was no exception.

The Commercial can be viewed Here.

I don’t often write about a job in as much detail as I have here. That’s because mostly I film in places that are familiar to me and perhaps the small details don’t really mean much. However this time around, I wanted to describe an experience in more detail, to record a more complete picture of my working life. Not that it’s that exciting but I wanted share what lengths we go to – to make a Television Commercial. This is part one of a two part series.

I arrived in Jakarta, after a flight from Melbourne, through Singapore, late on the 20th of October 2009. In the days proceeding, David Hewitt from Kemistry in Jakarta Indonesia had contacted me to see if I would be interested in Directing a TVC for Cussons Carex – A soap product. The Script had some similarities to some of my HP work and I felt that as long as I could make it different, the hands technique could work very well for the Cussons product also.

Directly after landing, I was whisked through immigration by an official who greeted me at the gate. I was sped through and released to a driver from Kemistry, who drove me through some pretty thick late night traffic in Jakarta for about an hour. On reaching the hotel, I had 30 minutes to get ready for an informal meet and greet plus a mini preproduction meeting in the lobby. There I met expat from Australia, David Hewitt, for the first time. After a quick meeting with some of the production staff, I finally got to sleep at about 11.30pm Jakarta time!

The next day, we hit the ground running by firstly checking out equipment at the local Camera Rental Facility CineRed. There I met another expat from Australia, creative consultant Peter Aquilina, who took us through a guided tour of his facility, which included the Camera Rental department, Post Production Facilities including Offline, Online and Grading using Scratch. After a very nice Javanese style lunch, we rushed to Kemistry’s office in Jakarta and began the process of Casting callbacks. I watched 9 girls present themselves which was in the end quite draining but necessary experience.

Day 2 started with me getting up very early to try and complete a massive pre production document for the PPM (Pre-Production Meeting) that afternoon. I spent quite a few days searching the net, scouring books and collaborating with Post Production Compositor Mike Parsons, from Chateau Post in Bangkok Thailand. By the afternoon, I had reviewed the Cast and made my recommendations, and produced a massive 50 slide Keynote presentation for the Client/Agency meeting at 5pm that day. That meeting went very well and that evening David and I went to have a drink at a local club in Kemang. There I met a group from various Agencies celebrating. I found it remarkable how many expats from Australia had settled in Jakarta and raved about how it is Asia’s best kept secret. To some degree, I think they were right!

Day3 was again full of preproduction madness. One unusual thing that happened was that I was requested by immigration to go down to their office and be fingerprinted, photographed etc I’m working in Indonesia with a proper work Visa so I have already gone through much of this in Melbourne at the Indonesian Embassy. Anyway, I turned up at the immigration office with David and waited inline with thousands of others in what looked like a scene from a movie. Ceiling fans churned the air slowly in the depressingly hot, public space of the immigration hall. A guy popped out of the crowd carrying my passport and warmly greeted me. I had never met him but I guess he had all my details including pictures of me! Taken into a back room, I waited with 10 or so others before being called by an immigration officer and summerly fingerprinted! If it wasn’t for some good company, I would definitely have found this process highly intimidating.

Next few days were spent working out our onset anamatic. For that I was in constant contact with Mike Parsons in Bangkok. He and I exchanged files over the internet, which for me was quite hard. Bandwidth in Jakarta gets very heavily bogged down during the day. With 240 million people, there is a lot of sharing of spaces, including of bandwidth to the internet. The roads are another major hazard. It’s relatively safe, but during the day the traffic builds up so thick that it flows like water around any obstacle or grinds to a halt. This includes sharing the footpath with millions of motorbike users and even cars, who skirt snarls in the traffic by driving on the footpath. Here’s a little clip shot on my 5DMKII.

Another comment about the footpaths in Indonesia – they are the worst I have seen anywhere. As an avid photographer, I like walking around taking photos. However in Jakarta, you need to be extremely careful that you don’t trip over rubbish on the ground, disappear into god knows what via massive holes in the ground or be impacted by a speeding motorbike.

After presenting our final preproduction items to the Client and Agency, everything was set in place for the production to take place. We shot at a small studio based in Mampang Jakarta. The crew were excellent and very efficiently setup the RED camera, Lighting and a huge video village. I often use vision mixers etc to incorporate 3D work by playing back guide animations from a DVD player. This time it was no exception. So we had a crew of guys handling the playback vision mixing requirements, proving a live image to an LCD screen hanging above the Camera. This was to allow our Cast, Amanda, to see herself relative to the guide animation. There were also the guys that handled the downloading of all the RED files and backing them up to multiple hard drives.

The shooting of this Commercial was made much easier by our Cast selection. I had chosen what I believed to be a very talented and pretty girl named Amanda. She appeared to take direction really well and understood the importance of the small details. However, even I was blown away by just how amazing this girl was. All day we practiced and improved her performance and gradually we began to film a few takes. By take 19, we were done. Her memory skills and subtleties of performance was astounding. The agency were also very impressed. The crew from McCan Jakarta were also really great to work with. I think they realised how technical the Commercial was to film and let me be for the most part. Constructively, they added value to the Clients concerns and supported me during presentation to Client. The day ended with the filming of references of the Products, some High Dynamic Range photography (HDRI) and some other textures. A very successful day.

Next day, straight into Offline. Eric (Offline editor) from CineRed had sent me the cut overnight! It was nearly perfect. Because we had shot on RED, the edit was simple to prepare. I did go through all my options but settled on what was obviously a great take. Based on this we cutdown a 15 sec and 5 sec version also. Client and Agency presentation followed in the afternoon and all were pretty happy. The following day was an early start again at Imaginex Studios Jakarta. I briefed the Composer for the design of the soundtrack then headed back to CineRed to conduct a final Grade of the RED images using Scratch. With our mission complete in Jakarta, it was time to pack the bags once more and fly to Bangkok Thailand, where the Online was to take place. This will feature in a separate article, soon to come. My final word for now is that although Jakarta is like a rough diamond, it’s a powerhouse of creative energy, fun people and an awesome place to film. I truly enjoyed my time there and hope to return soon.

The Finished Carex Commercial can be viewed here:

My updates to this blog slowed while I was working in Thailand recently. I found that when I wasn’t working, I was catching up with very good friends in Bangkok or touring the many Temples, Buddha’s and Palaces!! I have worked in Bangkok quite a few times, and every time with new people so I’m beginning to formulate a well rounded view on life working in Bangkok I think. In any case, I love working in Thailand because the people there are genuinely happy and nice.

While I can’t reveal why I’m filming in Thailand just yet, I can say that we looked at locations all over Bangkok. I spent several days driving from one side to the other, searching for places so I did get to see more of everyday Bangkok then most. As before, I was put up in the Nana district, in a very nice hotel. For some reason, I almost always get put up in this regions – I think this is because it’s close to the Production Houses, however the region is infamous for it’s nightlife and plentiful bars and pubs! I don’t mind but it does seem like a cliche to be constantly put up here!

Despite various coup attempts and “Airport lock downs”, Bangkok hasn’t changed at all. It’s a massive city with over 11 million people in it – so it’s dirty, exciting and fun! I caught up with my good friends Mike Parsons and his Wife, who have permanently moved to Thailand and they love it. On the photographic front, Bangkok is a treasure trove of opportunities. I packed my 5D MKII with all the lenses I could carry and walked for miles around the streets, alleyways and markets of Bangkok. For me, the biggest problem always is in deciding what gear I will take and what stays behind. It seems unfair that only 20KG of equipment can come along but their the airline rules …After our 2 day shoot had concluded, I spent a day traveling to Bangkok’s more tourist destinations. I have never actually done this before but this time I felt I should see something touristy! So I went by Skytrain (a rail service also known as BTS) to Central. Central is a very popular modern shopping district which I wasn’t that interested in. Just a side note, we actually filmed part of the TVC here. I then traveled to Wat Arun by Taxi and then on by Tuk Tuk to the Grand Palace, a famous temple with a 40 foot upright buddha and finally to the banks of the main river in Bangkok.I boarded a long boat here, and traveled al the way down the river back to Central, where I caught the Skytrain back to Nana! In a nutshell that was it! A huge day of walking around and seeing the sites! I have to say, it was amazing and I can highly recommend everyone visiting Bangkok should see at least the Grand Palace and Wat Arun. Probably the only trap for young players are the Tuk Tuk drivers. They work like Mafia controlled robots so watch out! Mostly they will offer you a very cheap deal – 10 baht to see x amount of places which is “like nothing”! This is because they are being paid also to take you to various store outlets etc around town. I suggest if you don’t want to spend your valuable time looking around for new Suits and Jewelry, then offer the driver 100 – 300 baht and he will take you only where you want to go. It’s not entirely a scam but they really should explain their situation before you get it!

For now, this is it. I will blog more later. Cheers!