Pasi Helin
"While I first started working with them as a runner, I later began to learn how to edit on the 1 inch, D2 machine, DCT and D1 machines. In 1992 we built the first digital edit suite in Sweden; which worked out well because commercial television started that same year in Sweden."
"I remember working on a TV ad in 1995 where Santa Clause was driving a car. Then suddenly we realized that he was not wearing a seatbelt, which is not allowed in Sweden. We had heard of Rushes in London, who had this amazing software that could do tracking. So we sent that shot of Santa to them and they tracked in the seatbelt. After seeing that, we went to IBC and bought the first Flame in Scandinavia. And that's how I first became an assistant to Linus who was running GSP's Flame."
"I have these cool memories of my first job on the Flame, as it was a music video. The client saw a video on MTV and they wanted the same glow on their video. Back then, I had to take the music video into Flame in two parts because the framestore wasn't big enough to take the whole music video. Then I had to render out the matte to create the glow on the highlights, which took a whole Saturday to render. I then laid out half the music video on tape and then took the other half into the Flame and rendered that all Sunday. It took me two whole days just to render the glow on a music video back then. And that was my first job as a Flame artist!"
"By coincidence, my father was working in Bangkok for Nokia. While I was in Bangkok visiting him, I went and saw a post production company called Fame Post. They said to me, 'Do you want to work here?' I said, 'But I am only 24 years old and a junior Flame guy!' It was crazy as I was treated as a Senior and getting the big jobs in Asia."
"After a year in Bangkok, I saw an ad on the Flame user group for Glassworks in London. I was one of 200 people who applied for that job. To get it, I flew to NAB to meet their MD, Hector Mecleod and then to London to meet the other Flame artists. I was scared to death because the best post production was being done by these Flame guys in SoHo. So when I got the job, it was even more frightening, because here I was 26 years old, moving to SoHo and now working for one of the hottest companies!"
"With my second job at Glassworks, I found myself working with Chris Cunningham. I had no idea who Chris was at the time, but everyone else knew who he was! So I did that job and everything went well and we worked really well together. I then found out that I was working with one of the best music film directors ever. From then on, I did a second and then a third job with him."
"The third job was Bjork's famous music video, 'All Is Full Of Love' with the two robots. Even today, that is still one of the top ten music videos of all time! With the first 2 music videos, I found that Chris really hated visual effects and wanted to create everything in camera. Then he came to me with the Bjork idea and he asked me if it was possible to do it and have it look photo realistic? Remember, I was 26 years old, so I said 'sure, don't worry!' But I had no idea if it was going to work."
"Chris said, 'OK lets do it.' However, he was still very cautious about how many effects shots to put into it. After a couple of days, he realized that this would look really good, so he went back and shot more shots that we could add CGI to. I worked day and night on that job for 5 weeks. When I saw the finished video, I thought that everybody would see all my effects and mistakes. But actually, everyone thought Chris had shot it all in camera! That music video won every award we entered, including MTV's 'Best Music Video!' And then suddenly all the post houses everywhere knew who I was."
"After being away from Sweden for 3 years, I started to really miss home. I really love the outdoors and fishing, but my life in Bangkok and London was all work. When I moved back to Sweden, I called Hector at Glassworks and said 'You should come over to Sweden and talk about starting Glassworks-Sweden.' When Hector came over, he said 'OK let's go for it!'"
The Glassworks Sweden exercise turned out to be short lived, when in 2000 Europe slipped into recession. Pasi then decided to sell his stake in Glassworks-Stockholm and move on. He looked into starting a Swedish division of The Mill, but then the Stopp offered him a partnership.
"When I joined Stopp in 2002, we had 16 people, 3 edit suites and 3 offline suites. I decided we should invest 2 million euro in a Spirit grading suite. In fact, we were the first post house in Sweden to have a telecine integrated into their post house. At this time in Sweden, grading companies and 3D companies were all separate and no one company had everything in one place. So I started a 3D department inside Stopp, and then realized, that we needed good producers that knew VFX."
"So after being a Flame artist at Stopp for two years, I moved across to VFX producing to do all of the complicated projects. Soon after that, we really began to grow and before long we were 25 people. Once we hit that size, I realized the company needed a leader and so I became the MD. The first big thing I worked on was starting a lab."
"At the time, we were not getting our film on time because the one lab in Sweden, only developed film during the day. I thought this was ridiculous and wondered why Sweden did not do what everyone else in the world does and develop in the night. After we started the lab, we soon had 95% of all the commercial work developing their film here. We said to our clients that we would offer 24/7 film developing and it worked!"
Pasi's most recent expansion for Stopp has been the opening of an interactive division in Los Angeles and Linz in Austria. His vision for Stopp is for it to become a sophisticated and internationally based on-stop-shop. Whether it's advertising, film, television or internet based, Stopp now has all the capabilities covered.
As one of his personal projects, Pasi has just finished an extreme fishing documentary for Swedish television, where he catches marlins from his kayak with only a fishing rod!