Rochambeau the Kingdom
"I started to think about how we could do something with the camera session that could be more creative than just a test shoot. Why not take full advantage of the opportunity to shoot with this thing, and see if we could get a finished commercial from it. The college only gave each student one go at this camera, so my buddy Jake Saner and I, combined our two sessions into one."
"You can kind of see the two sessions as one half of the commercial is all shot on black and the other is all shot on white. We basically took over the soundstage at NYU and the lobby for this shoot. In fact, there were sequences everywhere by the time we had finished, so everyone figured that we were doing something more than just a camera test."
"The whole process for this shoot was pretty much, back to front. We had the Phantom and now all we had to do was come up with an idea that would work for that camera - and then a client that would love the whole concept! My brother Duncan, who is one of the directors at All:Expanded approached Rochambeau and they seemed to be really happy with the whole concept."
"We had never shot with this camera on something this important before, so Jake and I had to really work it out pretty quickly. There was no time to experiment and calibrate the camera, so whatever we got was going to be what we had to work with."
"Its kind of funny how we came up with the idea of the archer for this spot. Looking at the footage now, the archer was really the perfect idea. Every month in SoHo, there is an archery store where they invite all of the local companies to be part of an archery event. So we just so happened to have started our own company archery team at All:Expanded."
"Sadly, I had only ever shot a bow four or five times, so trying to show the talent how it was done was going to be a problem. Fortunately, the head of cinematography at NYU is an archer and he had this beautiful bow. So I have to give credit to him, as to how the archer looks so good in terms of technique. Otherwise, who knows how it all could have turned out!"
"The next challenge was get the bow an arrows into the theatre and then have the talent fire it without anyone knowing. It was all fun and games really. At the end of the day, we couldn’t have anyone onset, because it could have been dangerous. So it all really came down to Jake and myself to work it all out."
"The Phantom was a bit of a nightmare to use, because it was all computer based. That in itself wasn’t the issue, it was just that you had to be a rocket scientist to know how to calibrate it. We couldn’t ask for any help, because we were shooting arrows off in the theatre, after all."
"This thing was great at shooting a 1,000 frames per second and we were having a lot of fun dusting the arrows to make tracers for example. But the footage we were getting was so seriously over saturated. I mean it was super, super saturated. Not what you want when you are shooting a commercial for a client."
"We really had no idea what we were going to get, so a lot of what you see comes down to the color grade. There were very few colorists at NYU because it wasn’t something they were really teaching. Fortunately, one of the other students, Eric Choquette is this self taught Davinci genius. I just basically sat down with Eric and Jake, and left Eric to desaturate all of the footage and see if he could make it all work. He is so super talented and he really saved the project with the grade in the end."
"This was a really cool project to do as a college prac session. I guess the real lesson, was to make something more of the opportunity and shoot something special."
