Philip Bloom

Sometimes you can come across work or assignments that seems daunting. Can I do this? Am I good enough? At my last year at film school I was assigned DoP for a project budgeting over 14000 Euros. As I learned, its all about getting together with people that are better than yourself and that is actually much easier with some money at hand! I think this makes for a good casestudy, since Ive tried to gather material from all sides of production, and through all stages with a visual referance. As students, we were really proud of this, and especially since theres not much vfx work being done in Norway. A year later of course, we know how to make it a 1000 times better, and thats how it should be!

ABOUT
Client: Oslokino
Production company:Westerdals Vel Fortalt
Producer: Håvar Karlsen/Magnus Rye
Director:Morten Sommerland
DoP:Håvar Karlsen

This project is from my last year at Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo, Norway. Its a school that focuses on storytelling and dramaturgy (for producer and directors), and very practial in its form (lots of moviemaking). The last year is made up as a company, were students receive real assignments from real customers for real money. Its one of these projects this casestudy is about.

PREPRODUCTION

We started out by presenting ideas for the client, Oslos chain of cinemas, Oslokino. They wanted a commercial for their own theatres to adverties the arrival of their new digitial cinema, scheduled to open at Grunerløkka, Oslo, in the fall of 2008. We presented 4-5 ideas, thinking they would choose one. They chose three, so this is just 1 of the 3 films we made for this client. The film I am presenting here, is an actiontrailer. Its a trailer as we are used to see them from Hollywood, with spectacular scenes here and there, and with a huge ending. Only, this time it doesnt “open in a cinema near you”. Its “A cinema coming near you”. Big laughs! We made a schetchfilm which was the base for their decision together with a oral pitch.

Watch it here!

We knew early on that this was going to be a heavy post-production film. We contacted The End, a post-production company based in Oslo, to see if they were interested. They have gathered a team of very talented 2d/comp/grading artists, and were more than willing to get into our project, since this could be a great showreel project. After weeks of storyboarding, testshoots and conversation with the tech guys at The End, we made a presentation to “lock” our decisions and shooting plans.

After getting green light from client and post-production, it was time for shooting!

SHOOTING
We did this film and one of the others (a much easier shoot) on the same rental equipment to save time and money. During week 7 2008, we shot this for 5 days and the other one on 1 day. Heres a list of some of the equipment used

• HVX200 w/2x16gb P2
• mini35 P+S Adapter
• 4x Zeiss Super speed (18, 35, 50, 85)
• LaCie 500GB HD for field dumping
• Followfocus and light matte box
• Polafilter, gradfilters
• Dolly with miniJib, and 10 meters tracks
• 4×4 meters reflection cloth and greenscreen
• A 2000w smokemachine
• A 7000w aggregat (just movable)
• A nice size rental
• …and several sparks and two huge explosive charges with a special light soil

We hired Petter Lee, a professional photographer educated from the Norwegian Film School, as b-photographer/focuspuller (!). He was a great asset to me, as I am a learning by doing photographer. We used Kai from Fiksern as pyrotechnician, and Tyrone Wiggins (Bad Boys 2!!) as stuntman. We were so happy to get so many talented indiviuals in on this, and with the rest of our class joining in as crew on set, and with the lower classes as productions assistants, we got a very nice production unit! Heres some stills from production. Enjoy!

We did so many cool shots during these 5 days that we were totally amped by the end of the week. Everyone involved, from fx guys to catering delivered as wanted, and we got a very smooth machinery up and running. We actually blew up 2 heavy explosive charges in one of Oslos most busy parks. We needed both police, fireguard and county approval, together with alot of extra personel to close of a 30 meters radius in the park!

SHOTS
All clips have been added a watermark, and therefore been recompressed
Heres a stunt bonus for you guys. Stuntman Tyrone Wiggins is a great guy, extremly professional and delivers on the mark. He has worked in Hollywood and is now living in Norway. Hes mostly doing stunt coordination over here, but now was his moment to shine.

1. Total
2. HVX200 720 50frames. Handheld by me
3. HDV 100shutter. Handheld
4. HDV on tripod

Watch it here!

Offlines
Heres the offline with added temp music. This is what we sent our composer as reference music. This is also a month earlier than the final offline. NO TITLING OR 2D/3D WORK HAS BEEN ADDED
Watch it here

Heres the a late offline sent to The End. This is stripped for music, but added temp sound to be able to play with that in 2d/3d work. Our final project will be soundedited at Soundfactory, in 5.1 NO TITLING OR 2D/3D WORK HAS BEEN ADDED

Watch in here

Comp work

We were all very exited when Matt Willis-Jones at The End was assigned to our project. Hes an extremely talented compositor, and is very exited about our project. We did a final walktrough with Matt and The End, together with Animidas, to compile a detailed FX-todolist. What can be done 2d, what needs 3d. etc. Just a few days later this dropped down into my inbox…

Watch it here!

This is a very early scetch, made only from 2d&stockimagery Matt had avaliable. He works with Quantel and Shake, and even if he said this was just a short test, it at least reassured us that we were on the right track, and involved with the right people.

UPDATE
The final, finished aired on every cinema in Oslo winter 2008

Again, thanks to everyone involved, so many has done a great job for us on this project. Im probably forgetting many, Ill try and update as I remember everyone

Petter Lee, Matt Willis-Jones, Lyder at Animidas, Carl Christian and Sveinung at Film&TV1, the entire Film&TV3, Oslo Kommune, Politiet, Brannvesnet, Fiksern, Norsk Film, Hugo på Videoutstyr, Bislet Bilutleie, Marianne at The End, Tyrone Wiggins, Daniel, Erlend Olaisen, Bøchman, all the extras, Soundfactory, Norsk Filmstudio, Anette Gjertsen, Marius Christiansen

Second film
Intro
During my last year of film school, we were assigned to a group of hip hopers wanting to make a musicvideo. Desperately trying to avoid booze and woman in bikinis, we searched the lyrics, which were about how life reapeats itselfs over and over again. Around and around (Rundt og rundt). I think this projects makes a decent case study, because we got made a indepth behind the scenes, following us in the process of preparing everything. As students, you dont always know that something is very difficult before you do it. Making a one-take musicvideo inside and outside, in the cold Norwegian Winter, with a 50 person crew is very difficult..

Watch it at http://www.hkarlsen.no/rundtogrundt.mov
watch behind the scenes http://www.hkarlsen.no/bak_bestweb.mov (in norwegian, but it features alot of onset, behind the scenes stuff)
The film won best in show and best musicvideo at Gullkalven 2008 AND Best Norwegian Musicvideo at Grimstad International Shortfilmfestival 2008!
http://kortfilmfestivalen.no/engframeset-1.html

The story behind this shot is this:

The idea for the shot came from 2 sources. The amazing one takes of “Children of Men”, and the not so well known film “Slacker”, where you never really have a main character. We decided early on that we wanted a steadicam one-take, on location in Oslo. A insane concept, with limited resources and winter right around the corner. But amazingly, this is actually one of the first projects where I can say that we really accomplished what we wanted, not adapting to “reality” on bit. There is not one edit!

Budget:
We had around 30000 NOK, about 5300$ for the project. We knew that we had a huge technical and professional cost, and also a lot of extras, which dont need alot, but its impossible to get them on set if they are not getting anything. We got great deals from Videoutstyr.no, Blixt, Christian Kvartz Lighting and Twentyfourseven, treating students with smile! Norwegian prices are high, among the highest in the world, so this is very little money..for those who wondered.

We knew our operator Atle Holtan from before, through his assistant Henrik Horgen, and they are great hardworking guys, trying to break it in the not-so-big norwegian industry. After this (and maybe because of this) Atle has worked on many of Norways feature films as steadicam operator!

Technical
The shot was made on a steadicam, HVX200 with 2x16gb P2, mini35 adapter, wireless focus and monitor and a huge Master Prime 18MM lens. We originally wanted the superspeed, but the guys at Blixt double booked us, but managed to get us this great lens. Perhaps a bit overkill, but at least it looks good. We shot in 1080 25p, after reading some comments on 1080 being less compressed, regardless of the 1080i issue

Emma, the director, had an idea of a location, and after a quick scout, we gathered some classmates, and made an improvised run (pieces of it in the behind the scenes). The distance covered/song timing turned out pretty good, so we started mapping up the entire area, trying to figure out where to put extras and where to do camera movements. We got Atle (steadi op) to look over it. We asked if we should ad safteypoints were we could fake the onetake if everything went bad, but he insisted on doing it for real (hurra!). We scheduled a training day before the real day with the cast and crew, and we tried to make the run go seamlessy between verses. At the day of the shooting, it was very cold (-12 c), and I started to worry about the lens fogging up (this had not struck my mind at all on beforehand). Luckily we werent outside for long enough for the lens to do that. The batteries on our boombox turned out to be the biggest problem, not liking the cold weather at all, so we ended up doing the playback on a mobile phone via an intercom beeing held up to the artists right in front of cam. A VERY fragile solution. To make matters worse, theres a bustop in the middle of the sidewalk, were buses arrived every 7th minute. Luckily, the government had recently installed realtime info on the busses, so we knew when we had a 7 minute gap. As you understand, this could not have been done without the help of every crewmember (many from school) looking out and stopping people on the sidewalks, We did have permission to shoot and to stop people, but no carstopping, that you need police for. In the end, we needed some luck to nail this, but we would never have gotten it without the preparation. We were a very happy bunch when we understood that the 5th take was a succsess. On the 6th, the sun had already changed so much that it was a bit underexposed. Phew!

A big thanks to everyone involved, and especially my co-producer http://www.lindsaysanner.com and director Emilia Danilovic.

Check out my vimeo page here…