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SELLING PENSIONS
Convincing the public that taking out a pension should be a priority, the Irish government set about depicting this as one of life’s most important decisions. The task of filming the people to whom this message was addressed fell to DP Peter Robertson who explains to Anwar Brett what he did, and how he did it.
Client: The Pensions Board Agency: McConnells Production Company: Red Rage Director: Brian Durnin Producer: Paul Holmes
The commercial was made to encourage people to take out pensions, and the idea was we saw different people going through their various daily
routines. There’s a businessman, a tree surgeon up a tree, a fisherman, a taxi driver; it was just about capturing
“the every day lives of these people. We were trying to show a cross sec- tion, with the inference that they all should have a pension, or should get one. I shot it on the 16mm Eterna 250D 8663, and used some of the Super F-64D 8622, as well.
For the brighter, more open sce- narios I used the 64 daylight to keep as clean an image as possible. The whole thing was shot in a day and I think we did upwards of half a dozen set-ups in a range of locations. We had a small crew; it wasn’t a big lighting complement so it was very much like guerrilla filming. Making one scenario look different from the next was a lot to do with lens choice.
We had one guy who was a scrap metal worker, and we put him in the foreground on a very wide lens, then had all the scrap metal – a 50 foot pile of it – in the deeper background. For the office worker on the street, we shot that on two very long lenses. There was a woman in her thirties and we shot her outside of a new tower block. She was in the foreground and
we had a big wide lens and the tower block shooting up behind her. Then we’d go in and cover it with the close ups.
Brian [Durnin] had various photo- graphic references that he liked and we also went round to the various locations a week before we shot and we decided what would work best. They were all real locations, and real people. I was never concerned about the light levels. As far as I remember we started at seven o’clock in the morning and we’d wrapped by seven o’clock at night so there was no prob- lem.
The scenes are so short, you’re talking about four or five shots for each one, so even if it was raining for one of them and the sun was out for another that was absolutely fine. To be honest, the commercial was fairly straightforward, it was an all-
day exterior, a few set ups, so
it was really just a question of
getting around Dublin and
shooting quickly. ■
The Irish Pension Board commercial was ori”ginated on 16mm Eterna 250D 8663
and Super F-64D 8622
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 29