YDA award winners in 2005 Alex & Steffen talk us through the 3D intricacies of shooting Batelco. Here we gooooo…

What 3D modeling program do you use?
All our visual effects we do here at Unexpected in Stuttgart is done with Autodesk 3D Studio MAX. We started with 3D Studio MAX eleven years ago when we were just four guys. As we gradually grew up to our today’s staff of 40 artists we just kept buying licenses :). It fits really well into our pipeline together with Adobe Premiere CS5, After Effects CS5 and Nuke X. Everything here is pretty much straight forward to achieve a fast and effective workflow.

Where was the location shoot?
Initially we planned to shoot the commercial in Bahrain itself or Dubai. We love their new stylish skyscrapers and their high-rise buildings. But when we googled the cities and their surroundings we saw that the buildings are just way too scattered and that there is no real “future” downtown. So we’d have to spend more time making this city believable and suitable for our needs than we expected. So we decided to shoot everything in Toronto and compose typical Bahrain landmarks into the shots wherever it was possible to make it a believable future Bahrain. The good thing about Toronto is that it is a pretty generic city, but in a very good way. You can tell NY or any other metropolitan city there… even future Bahrain. And the film-infrastructure as well as the good-will of the city itself in terms of permits and the freedom you have there is amazing. And as Spyfilms is based in Toronto it was even better for us as they know everything and everyone.

What were the main challenges of the shoot?
It was quite hard to squeeze so many different scenarios in the few shooting days we had. Sunlight travels fast and being right in the middle of downtown you can almost see the shadows travelling, therefore it’s pretty hard to keep a good continuity from shot to shot. Having that in mind we decided to shoot the whole film (besides one single shot that was done with a RED camera) with Digital SLRs as we could have more cameras for less money. So we shot with four Canon 7Ds and two Canon 5D Mark IIs. Of course that is definitely not the best choice if it comes to a post-heavy spot as the material is not as good as the material of a RED, Arri Alexa or any other real pro camera, but we knew from tests that we can deal with it. It’s a bit more work but it’s better to get all the shots and have more work in the post-process than not getting some scenes.

And speaking of toys like digital SLRs – we always love to try some new things. As we knew that we wouldn’t be able to move around from set to set very quickly, we had to keep most of our gear light and easy. So we found Eric Austin from Helivideo with his very cool and stabilized mini-helicopter. We saw clips he shot with his equipment on Youtube and instantly fell in love with the idea of having that on our shoot. There are lots of shots we would not have got without Eric. It also had a remote head installed so we could execute some real nice camera moves which you would be very hard or expensive to shoot. Especially in the subway, the mall and the park.

Did you storyboard absolutely every frame? Is there any room when working with 3D for anything spontaneous to happen as in live-action?
For a project like Batelco we always prepare an animatic which is more or less the fully edited spot animated in 3D where we pre-visualize the whole ad. This is a good base to explain to the agency and the client how we see the pace and the mood of the spot. For some shots this is essential and in the end a big time saver as the crew knows the shots and setups are quicker to be done, especially when shooting in a city like Toronto, where you can’t block traffic forever and the moving sunlight always works against you. The boy with the huge gorilla scene, the transforming car and the soccer sequences were planned very well as they were the most critical in terms of time and light. The beginning of the rollercoaster scene was planned but adapted to our set whereas the rest of the rollercoaster, skater, glider and formula 1 shots are pretty much freestyle and spontaneous. We know what we can and cannot do in post so we just try to get the most interesting shots which look great no matter how much work we’ll have to face during the postproduction. Our team by now knows how we shoot and they are always prepared for new shots which have not been in the animatic – but we think we´re still way better than a director who changes his vision on a daily basis which is the nightmare for any artist in postproduction.

How do the dynamics of your partnership work? Do you both work on the same things together or does one of you focus on a particular aspect of the work while the other does something else?
That’s a question we get quite often. During the post process we are split into two departments. Steffen is working as a 2D compositor with his team and I am working as a 3D artist with my 3D team. So this way we have a nice and smooth workflow.
On set it is completely different. As we both work on the animatic or the storyboard in the beginning we’re both completely aligned on what we want. So on set you will always see one of us lining up the shot with the team while the other is either talking to the actor or explaining everything to the agency and client. At some point we might just switch without talking to each other as we already know what’s next. We both have the same visual language and vision which makes it really easy and cool to work together.

Sometimes we even split up in two crews if we have a huge amount of shots to be done. We distribute the scenes between us and off we go. Last year we shot a huge commercial in Istanbul (Vestel – Game) where we needed to shoot 62 setups with 10 kids in daylight. So we just built two units and started shooting. You can’t tell who shot which scene but this was the only way we could get this one done.

Now that you’ve done this short film are you thinking of doing a movie?
Let’s put it this way: there is some interest from outside the ad world and we do get contacted about it. Let’s see :).