The Bigger Picture

Got a nice telly have ya? LCD is it? Nice and flat? HD up the ying-yang? Plays your Sex And The City box set all pretty like? Well chuck it out the window and clear some space on the wall – Philips’ Cinema 21:9 has come to town, and it’s brought an impressive interactive campaign with it!

Created for Tribal DDB Amsterdam by London based digital production company Stick Digital, the interactive campaign promotes Philips’ latest entrant into the television market. Since the television’s 21:9 frame lends itself so readily to film, the agency tapped the friendly Stinkers to create a piece of filmed content that could hold its own with Hollywood’s best. Director Adam Berg responded with an idea for an epic ‘frozen moment’ cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass, bullet casings and blood.

Check out the site and extraordinary film here - http://www.cinema.philips.com/

Got questions? Well so did we – so we’re fired them to Exec Producer and uber-nice-guy Mark Pytlik for a bit of insight.


What was the concept Tribal DDB approached you with?

Tribal knew that the core proposition of their 21:9 TV was that it was really going to appeal to cinema heads, so they came to us looking for something really cinematic. We kicked around a lot of ideas, including a Children Of Men-style tracking shot, but once we got Adam involved in the project, the 'frozen moment' (which is a technique he'd done before) started to emerge as the runaway favourite approach. From there we had lots of fun trying to build it into a story that had some sort of linear arc to it, which was more difficult to do when everything's frozen than you might assume.

The subject matter (gun-toting clowns causing merry hell) is quite dark. Who came up with it?

That was Adam as well. The film is pretty obviously a synthesis of tropes from some big action films from the past decade -- I think we all wanted to work in a language that would be immediately understandable as 'cinematic'. As for the clowns, what can you say? I don't think they'll ever stop being scary.

How important was it to make the film as cinematic as possible?

Massively -- this was a core part of the main brief. I could spend all day listing off the things we did to make sure this felt more like a piece of cinema than an ad. We brought in Stillking (Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace) to service the shoot in Prague, hired a motion control rig, shot on 35mm, got MPC's Jean-Clement Soret (Slumdog Millionaire) to do the grade -- the list goes on.

Can you let us in on trade secrets and tell us how many shots it took to make the complete loop?

What -- and spoil the movie magic?

What were the biggest challenges you encountered with the shoot and how did you overcome them?

Lots. The shoot was, incredibly, only a two-day shoot, when realistically, it should have been more like four. So that was challenging. It rained for about three hours while we shot our exteriors, which was a nightmare, as rain and motion control do not mix. I lost all my fingernails that evening. The post was a bear, too. I honestly don't think Richard at Redrum in Stockholm slept for the last four days before delivery.


Likewise, were there challenges in creating the microsite to house the film?

Because the final film and the hotspots didn't really come until the end of the project, we spent a while building the microsite feeling 99% positive -- but not knowing for sure -- that the transitions would look and feel as seamless as they did in our plans. Otherwise, most of the challenges on that side came from the timeframe -- it was basically a race to the finish from the very start. We had developers here all weekend before the soft launch knocking down bugs. I don't think anyone minded until it was time to try and go home. Have you ever ridden a bus sober at 3am on a Saturday night in Shoreditch?

What was the thinking behind the embedded hotspots?

The TV has three main selling points: the 21:9 frame, the ambilight, and the picture quality. The agency equated each of these to a different member of a film crew (Director, DoP and VFX Supervisor) and then used the behind the scenes conceit as a launching pad to talk about the importance of each to cinema. We also really wanted to make the transitions from film to behind the scenes absolutely seamless -- the idea was that you should feel like you were slipping back and forth between both worlds really easily...

If you could watch any movie on the Philips 21:9 screen, what would it be?

Is Tron too predictable an answer? If so, then, I don't know, Fried Green Tomatoes.

So there we go, tough shoot, scary clowns and a dose of Tron. What more could you want? We look forward to seeing more digi-magic from the Stink Digital crew in the future.

beta.stinkdigital.tv

Here are the credits for all you 'who did wot' lovers out there:

AGENCY
Tribal DDB, Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director: Neil Dawson
CD: Chris Baylis
Senior Project Manager: John Reardon
Producer: Jeroen Jedeloo, Iwona Echt
Art Director: Mariota Essery, Andrew Ferguson
Copywriter: Carla Madden, Chris Baylis
Account Planner: Sean Chambers
Technical Lead: Jan Willem Penterman

FILM
Production Company: Stink Digital
Executive Producer: Mark Pytlik, Daniel Bergmann, Stephen Brierley
Producer: Simon Eakhurst, Stephen Brierley
Director: Adam Berg
DoP: Fredrik Backar

Service Facilities: Stillking, Prague
Stillking Line Producer: Zuzana de Pagter
1st AD: Jiri Ostry
Production Designer: Petr Kunc -
Czech Production Manager : Jiri Kotlas -
Stunt Co-Ordinator: Lada Lahoda @ Filmca

Editor: Paul Hardcastle @ Trim
VFX: Redrum, Stockholm
Post Production Supervisor: Richard Lyons
Music & Sound Design: Michael Fakesch
Additional Sound Design: Tim Davis
Colorist: Jean-Clement Soret @ MPC London
UK Production Manager: Jemma Daniel

INTERACTIVE
Production Company: Stink Digital
Executive Producer: Mark Pytlik
Project Manager: Christophe Taddei
Lead Developer: Ian McGregor
Key Developers: Vincent Roman, Jamie Copeland, Matt Sweetman
Additional Development: Pierre L. Thiebaut
Design: Eric Chia
Title Sequence & Trailer: Maximiliano Chanan, Odin Church