Page 27 - Fujifilm Exposure_23 Wildlife_ok

INTRODUCE
AGENCY: BSKYB PRODUCTION COMPANY: BSKYB DIRECTOR: GEOFF TRODD
INTRODUCE
A FRIEND
A FRIEND
DP Simon Minett gets friendly with Anwar Brett
EXPOSURE • 25
believed in the image you were seeing. That’s why it was all location instead of in the studio. And while we were concentrating on faces a lot of the time they really wanted an authentic texture to the background.
We used a Clairmont Swing Shift lens system which was a major factor in the look of the campaign. It enables you to throw areas of the frame out of focus or to give the impression that you’ve got a very shallow depth of field – which makes it a very effective tool.
The BSkyB campaign was called Introduce A Friend and featured six 30 second slots all shot on 35mm Fuji stocks. We were to cover as many dif-
ferent facets of UK life as possible. It wasn’t supposed to be too
glossy; it needed to have good photog- “raphy but be very real so that you
We shot in various locations, but up in Gateshead we were filming in a foundry and that was really where I decided to use the Fuji Reala 500D stock. I did a recce a week beforehand and found that parts of the foundry were, as you’d expect, extremely gloomy until they start pouring the molten metal when you then have masses of highlights going on.
I wasn’t sure at that stage what I was going to shoot it on. I thought about putting lights around and hav- ing crew and stuff, but that just wasn’t possible. It was an incredibly danger- ous place with a lot of big industrial lumps of metal being moved around by people in their protective gear.
And the amount of time we had to shoot in each location was very limit- ed so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that much in terms of lighting.
But we shot it on the Reala, using these Swing Shift lenses and they are inherently slow anyway; that’s a limi- tation – you sacrifice lens speed in order to be able to control the depth of field and the focus like that. But the results were fantastic.
The image of this molten metal being poured, with a guy
standing next to it, was the
real money shot of the cam-
paign. There’s a fantastic range of exposure just there. ■
BSkyB’s Introduce A Friend was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
”
commercial break