Page 32 - Fujifilm Exposure_16 Bob The Builder_ok

HOLD TIGHT, PLEASE
Visitors to London’s Old Spitalfields Market one evening in early January may have been puzzled to see a mobile discotech driving around the area. It was, in fact, a single decker bus complete with crew, camera and lights shooting a 60 second cinema commer- cial for Arriva buses.
The film shows two young passen- gers in a heavy snogging session when, just before it becomes Adult Rated, the girl asks the guy “Your place or mine?”. Sorry, we can’t reveal any more - you have to go to your multi-screen for the climax sometime in March (travelling by Arriva bus of course).
John Wyatt BSC was responsible for the “disco effect”, in reality a cus- tom built model turntable with cut- outs to provide a moving light effect supplementing the real traffic seen outside the bus.
A mixture of 300W incandescent and small KinoFlo banks provided just the right look captured on Fuji 500 via a Panavision Millennium super 35mm camera system. (Producer Ross Cameron was somewhat phased by a model turntable on the lighting list but took it like a man!)
“I first used rotating cut-outs shooting a train sequence for the BBC’s 10-parter Fair Stood The Wind For France said Wyatt. “That time we were static in a tunnel and the turntable was five metres in diameter. The Arriva shoot just needed an on- board model-rig, powered with all the other lights, by a 3Kw generator strapped to the roof of the bus”.
“A blonde female artiste and the low key East End exteriors provided quite a contrast challenge, especially for cinema release. But Fuji 500 cap- tured both highlight and shadow detail superbly and so faithfully that the post production colourising was quick and effective”.
The Arriva buses commercial was written by Ross Thompson, directed by Cogent Advertising’s Creative Director Richard Payne, and produced by Tamzin Locise and Ross Cameron of Tangent Television. ■
ABOUT A GIRL
Cinematographer Geoff Boyle reports on his latest short film assignment, About A Girl, a dark interior monologue that reflects on the pre-occupations of a 13- year old’s troubled life. Produced by Janey de Nordwall, written by Julie Rutterford and directed by Brian Percival, the 10-minute film starring Ashley Thewlis will play at festivals during the year.
“On About A Girl, I’ve tried to use digital post production in a less obvious way than before, because it seems to me that it’s always used for effects shots or even entire movies where the audience is supposed to know that there has been something done to the image.
I and the director both
wanted to post produce
digitally partly because it
was important to us to
maintain the tools that
we would typically use in
post producing commer-
cials. The prospect of
taking a ‘conventional’
post production route,
with all its limitations,
horrified us.
The visual
approach, which we
have emphasised in
post production, was
to hugely over-correct
the image at first. We
shot with an 85B and a set
of custom made Corals, gradually reducing the amount of filtration as we went through the story until we were very under-corrected and had almost no filters on. It was the equivalent of an 81B by the end.
By shooting greyscales with the filters on we can then correct back the mid-tones in each case to ‘neutral’. This has the effect of reducing the blues and greens at the start of the film whilst enhancing the warmer colours, but the overall feel is ‘nor- mal’. We then reduce the over-correc- tion of warm filters, still correcting back to ‘neutral’ at each change.
This gradually swings the look
from warm to cold, slowly losing the warm tones and bringing out the cold ones. For the last scene we
change both filters and film stock switching from the low contrast F400 to a more ‘contrasty’ 250 daylight.
We also switched stock manufac- turers for the last shot to make the difference fairly extreme. All the flash- backs in the movie were deliberately shot straight. This change of colour & tone can easily be enhanced in a digi- tal post, and we can also correct things like mis-matched skies that would have delayed shooting to a totally uneconomic degree.
In the end the idea of doing our post pro- duction digitally was to emphasise the storyline in a subtle way. Hopefully, nobody will notice the change in colour directly; it will be more of a sub- liminal effect. ”
Photos: Geoff Boyle on location with cast and crew of About A Girl
EXPOSURE • 30 & 31