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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

ACTION HERO - action packed TVC for Swisscom

Tobias Straka

Tobias Straka

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Hey guys

Here's our latest commercial we shot on 2 EPICs and 1 SCARLET.

"Action Hero" is a TVC we produced for Switzerland based company "Swisscom". Swisscom is the biggest phone company in Switzerland, but the division we shot this for focuses solely on Outsourcing, hence the theme.

The clients were way cool letting us go completely crazy with this one, so we did. We made that thing bigger than the budged really allowed simply because it was so much fun! Hell, we ran around for 2 days blowing up stuff and shooting guns, what more can you ask for, heheh...

Some tech facts. We shot 3 REDs pretty much all the time, giving us lots of coverage. In post, we actually degraded the footage by deliberately losing information in the lows and adding tons of grain (Film Convert). We had to go very aggressive so that the difference between the two settings were very clear. But to be honest, I like the gritty look that gave us, it's really dirty and dark, exactly what we were aiming for. It was really hard sometimes to mess with the lovely images we got directly from camera, but hey...

Make sure you crank up your speakers, use headphones or whatever! Also, you can download the .mov from Vimeo if you want, compression isn't so nice on that dark stuff...

Oh, and by the way - our EPIC is starring in this piece very prominently... :)

So have fun watching, and please, spread the word, share, comment!

Tobias

VIMEO:


Link: https://vimeo.com/73766559


SOME SCREENSHOTS:

action-hero-1.jpg


action-hero-6.jpg


action-hero-4.jpg


action-hero-5.jpg
 
Thanks Christian!

BTW: we mainly used Optimos, one long, one short. On the Scarlet, we had Canon L's. We also had a whole set of Ultra Primes with us, but we rarely used them. Loving the Optimo look - I will post some before-the-grading pics so you can tell how beautiful this stuff "was"... :)
 
Fantastic! Love the end. Brilliantly written and produced, well done. Yes, would LOVE to see ungraded clips to compare.

Really Great!
 
Thanks so much everyone, I'm really happy to hear you like it! And really appreciate your comments!

I will post more tomorrow when I'm back at the office, but here's one before - after screenshot. Exported from RCX with some slight adjustments only. As you can see, the original was silky smooth. Really broke my heart to "destroy" it... :)

BEFORE:

action-hero-before-1.jpg


AFTER:

action-hero-1.jpg
 
So here's our little arsenal. 2 EPICs, 1 SCARLET. There was another 2 or so 5Ds floating around, but none of that footage was used. Big surprise...

bts_01.jpg


bts_02.jpg



And seriously - watching playback was so much fun... Just as the rest of the shoot... :)

bts_03.jpg
 
Kenny Mosher said:
Great job Tobias!! Love the look of it
Click to expand...

Thanks Kenny. I do like the look, too - I think that grain makes the image as gritty as the scene / mood called for. I think it's important to notice that the original images looked really just beautiful. Our amazing DP Pascal Walder were playing around quite a bit with practical flares, there was pretty much always at least one flashlight shining in the lens. So (almost) all the flares you see were done in camera. We also had a clear filter in front of the lens and made it dirty by purpose. Your very own streak filter - just take any glass and wipe over it with your dirty fingers the direction you want the light to streak...
 
Tobias Straka said:
Thanks Kenny. I do like the look, too - I think that grain makes the image as gritty as the scene / mood called for. I think it's important to notice that the original images looked really just beautiful. Our amazing DP Pascal Walder were playing around quite a bit with practical flares, there was pretty much always at least one flashlight shining in the lens. So (almost) all the flares you see were done in camera. We also had a clear filter in front of the lens and made it dirty by purpose. Your very own streak filter - just take any glass and wipe over it with your dirty fingers the direction you want the light to streak...
Click to expand...

interesting thanks for sharing these tips
about the finger stains, did you use Vaseline or anything else ?
 
Karim_Nassar said:
interesting thanks for sharing these tips
about the finger stains, did you use Vaseline or anything else ?
Click to expand...

We did not use Vaseline on this one, we wanted the streaks to be subtle. So we really just used our dirty hands, that's enough... :)

We shot another short with Ueli Steiger, ASC, where he did make use of a LOT of Vaseline for a very dream-like look. That wasn't for flares, but it looked cool, too. Here's him applying the goods.... :)

ueli.jpg
 
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