Page 9 - Fujifilm Exposure_25 Jean Francois Robin_ok

commercial break
Are You Ready?
Agency: BSkyB Production Company: BSkyB Director: John Grint Producer: Nick Canham
DP Gerry Floyd talks sport with Anwar Brett
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 7
The commercial was a Sky Sports promotion, featuring Elton John. For this we built a scaled down football pitch inside a studio, with a stylised
vision of the pitch itself. For all that, the producers wanted it to look like a large stadium, with the lights seeming
“like real floodlights.
At first we were very keen to use Wendy lights, but that would have
something like a 14mm lens in order to get as many of the lights in as possible. And of course we only had Elton
for a couple of hours so we had no time to waste. Fortunately we had two days of pre-lighting as well as some camera rehearsal so I had a good idea of where I was stop-wise.
I operated the crane, and we had two Super 35 cameras, and we really had a lot of light. I used the F-400 tung- sten stock because I knew we wanted to do some slow motion stuff, with some skinny shutter stuff.
I went with the 400T because I knew I could do all that without worrying about re-lighting or re-balancing. I knew the stock could cope with a lot of that.
Besides all that we ran the Dinos at 40% of their maximum output, and flashed them so they would pulse at certain points in the song. We timed the programme through the lighting desk, which was connected up to the playback which could be adjusted but also was able to stay the same throughout the song.
Shooting Super 35, I wasn’t so wor- ried about the grain, there was-
n’t much post production going
on afterwards, so I knew I
could use it and still get a real- lygoodlookattheendofit.■
required a lot of generator power down there and they were quite expensive, so we ended up using a dozen Dinos.
The football pitch was against a black background, there was a podium with dancers on it and a raised area in the middle central with Elton himself on it. And behind him there was a huge LED screen projecting football scenes with various star players.
But one of the key images was this floodlight effect so that it made it look like a real stadium with a foot- ball atmosphere.
We had all our lights going back through dimmers, with moving effects lights working at the back of the stage as well, trying to give the whole thing an amphitheatre type feel.
They were very keen at some point to see the whole pitch, filled with peo- ple and all the lights. We had to use
”