Page 13 - Fujifilm Exposure_45 Ondine_ok

COMMERCIAL BREAK
CROSSANONLOCATION
SHOOTING A SERIES OF BOWIE WANNABES AND BASE-JUMPING OFF TALL BUILDINGS IN BERLIN. IT’S ALL IN A DAY’S WORK FOR DP DENIS CROSSAN BSC, AS HE TOLD ANWAR BRETT
“I REALLY LIKE THE ETERNA 250D AS A STOCK.”
The Vodafone commercial was shot in Berlin. It features lots of different people singing the David
“Bowie track ‘Heroes’ as they do different things. It’s basically a series of vignettes such as two guys dressed as spacemen suspended from wires in their living room, an old lady surfing the internet, a guy who’s built himself a rocket, and a kid who stacks dice and then swipes them away really quickly.
One of the elements in there was this guy doing a base jump off a building the size of Centre Point. He did it four times. We had to build a platform and use a crane, because when he jumped we wanted to crane out with him so that you saw all the way down the building. We had a couple of cameras on that; I had a remote Technocrane above him so that as he took his leap off the building you could see it all, and as his parachute opened you looked down on it.
I was operating, and I was also intent on keeping the side of the building in shot so you actually see where he jumps from instead of just having him come into space. In his first jump he almost took me by surprise because he took a couple of steps and then did this amazing leap off the building. I had another camera on the ground filming some closer stuff on him, so we did various sizes on that.
I pretty much stuck to the same stock for him, the Super F-64 D, but I used a super enhancer a few times to bring up the colour. Occasionally I would either slightly over expose or under expose the stocks. A lot of the stuff I was doing with flares; I was using mirrors when we were outside so I would always get the heaviest flare that I could in the lens.
I really like the ETERNA 250D as a stock. If I’m doing a lot of variations on stuff I’ll usually stick with that and ND it down, but because these were all little
individual vignettes you could treat each one differently.
That’s why I decided to use
more than one stock, not necessarily because I thought there was any difference but I didn’t really want to
put lots of NDs in front of the lens. I wanted to use other things, like en- hancers or grads because there were some great skies out there.
Above all I wanted to keep a
really good punchy image
throughout the whole of the
commercial. ”
The Vodafone commercial was originated on 35mm Fujicolor Super F-64D 8522, ETERNA 250D 8563 and ETERNA 500T 8573
Director: Vaughan Arnell Production Company: Serious Pictures, Embassy of Dreams
Photos left to right above: Denis Crossan BSC; stills from the shoot courtesy of Vodafone on flikr.com
FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE • THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 11