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commercial break
WH SMITH’S CHRISTMAS SPECIAL
Agency: Abbot Mead Vickers Production Company: Exposure Directors: Jake & Jim Producer: Nick Canham
DP Jake Polonsky gets festive with Anwar Brett
The commercial is basically a continuation of an existing campaign. The idea is that the camera is moving out of an environment, and as it goes
through the window you realise you were inside a WH Smith shop: the exterior is not what the viewer is
“expecting to see.
We start close in on a Christmas tree, and then move over various gifts.
the motion control people we mapped out the points within the set from where the camera started. So long as its height and angle exactly matched up, we knew we’d be able to compos- ite the set with the exterior location.
The real problem was that the cam- era starts right up against a Christmas tree and as it travels back you see a real ceiling. To light a set like that you’d normally have a rig above it, and that didn’t seem possible at first though we found a way round it.
The camera was an old Mitchell that was bolted on to the motion con- trol system, and we had to use the full length of the zoom within the shot to be able to travel the distance neces- sary within the time of the commer- cial. It was going at full pelt to be able to do that.
On this job we had to fulfil a very specific brief, to give a very precise rendition of people’s idealisation of Christmas. The good thing is that there’s not much disagreement over what that means, as opposed to more abstract concepts where peo-
ple will have varying opinions. Here, everyone knows it right when they see it. ■
You travel out of the living room and you see this little girl dressing the Christmas tree and as it comes through the window of the shop front the camera keeps on moving in and cranes up to reveal that you’re in a nice Christmas scene in a high street.
I used the 35mm Fujicolor 500T 8572 which has very good sharpness and colour. I wanted to use one stock for the commercial but I found that some of the newer stocks that are sup- posedly optimised for telecine seem to have almost got so low contrast, and lose so much character, that they feel a little bit bland. I like the fact that the F-500T has its own personality.
Technically it was a very compli- cated shoot, very labour intensive, because we had to match the two parts of what we were doing so that it looked like one seamless shot. With
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 13
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