TOYOTA VIOS ‘Made for More’
I must admit, it’s been a while since I’ve shot a full on car commercial, & on this scale. The biggest I’ve ever done to be honest. Of course, it came with many challenges, especially shooting this many shots within 3 days – ended having 1 additional conti day due to rain. From the mind of Agency Hakuhodo, clients Toyota, & PH Shootworksasia, we tried to simplify the board as much as possible, without losing the essence of the storyline & concept. And it worked, but we had to split the team into 2 with 1st unit shooting the main car action stuff, & 2nd unit – headed by 1st AD Shane Nunis – shot the pick ups. We had to limit certain locations as they were far apart & again, logistics didn’t help with the limited number of days. But a requirement from our side was that we have 2 cars of each color – so we could rig one & the other one could be used by any of the split teams at any time. One of the larger setups was the studio 60×20 LED screen setup, which we projected some cool 2d motion graphics created by Postfellas & used them as a background & reflections on the cars. Then we had another tube light setup that followed the top silhouette of our Vios GR Sports with reflective flooring. Then we had driving shots during the day, night, on bridges that would have extended the shoot times if we didn’t have the Motocrane with us, from Sam Chee. My 1st experience with it, & I loved it! Smooth, no issues, easy to maneuver (I even helped with the camera rotation angles for the car). And what’s a car shoot without dynamic drone shots, courtesy of How Yi. He used his Komodo mounted onto the Cinelifter that he custom made, & that gave us amazing FPV angles. And then we had talent shots at home, arriving at an office, a bicycle stunt scene, football scenes, dining scenes, everything but the kitchen sink. All in, it was a huge undertaking & we all worked our butts off to bring this to fruition. The end result speaks for itself…nothing short of amazing. Shot by Eric Yeong DP, with his Mavo8k, Red Komodo, Panasonic S1H, Panasonic GH5. Color graded by Beh, edited by Ng, & the rest of post-production by Postfellas, with Ken as Online artist – who had his work cut out for him touching up all the roads :O