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Recently, I shot Trucks, the second ad for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk’s A Glass and a Half Productions. The brief was to make a high calibre short film with humble airport trucks as the stars. The treatment described, ‘a beautiful cinematic event’.

This was my third collaboration with Juan Cabral, and his second stab at directing a commercial, following his previous Cadbury’s ad, Gorilla. Gorilla was a phenomenon, receiving upwards of 20 million hits on YouTube alone. It was a hugely successful TV campaign, winning three Gold BTAA Awards 2008, the Creative Circle Gold Award 2008, and was Campaign magazine’s Commercial of the Year 2008. Not bad for a first effort, Juan.

Both ads (and spoofs) can be found at www.glassandahalffullproductions.com

What I found refreshing about the scripts was the freedom from the product. The aim was to provide pure entertainment for the viewer, with the aim that they associate the pleasure they get from watching the films with the product. For us as filmmakers it was an interesting and exciting experience, but not one that was without pressure.

Trucks was far more ambitious than Gorilla in every way. It was set at an airport at night – a race between weird and wonderful airport trucks, pimped and souped up for the night of their lives. The location was Queretaro airport, central Mexico. This provided us with a fantastic location, but also a big set of problems relating to shooting around the many restrictions imposed by the safety and security protocols at an international airport.

I came on board a week before the shoot, straight after shooting another commercial in Rome. I tried to prepare as much as possible, via email and telephone, without taking my mind off the job I was shooting. This involved studying location pictures, maps, vehicles, photometric data, and watching every car chase movie ever shot, as well as visual references from films such as Michael Mann’s Collateral.

There is only so much one can do from a distance; nevertheless, there were decisions I had to make before arriving. One of which was to shoot a combination of 35mm film and HD. Juan was interested in shooting HD; he loved the look of Collateral, and he liked the immediacy of the HD pictures. One of the things that struck him was that they made everything look real, especially when shot with ‘available’ light. (Every DP knows that looking like available light and using available light are two different things.)

I liked the look of the movie – the night exteriors are wonderful – but I thought they would have looked great shot on film too. This is not a film versus HD video argument, because in my mind there isn’t one. They are different tools. Film is more malleable in terms of look; you can do a lot more with it ‘in camera’, and if you want to create a rich, glossy polished looking movie, it would be my choice. It has more latitude and handles highlights much better. HD can look great, but it’s harder work to balance the contrast.

DPs are not usually consulted when decisions on shooting format are made, which puzzles me, as I think we probably know more than anyone about the capabilities and suitability – and limitations – of each format, as well as how to manipulate them to get the required look in the best possible way. So I was very glad to be involved at this stage, and was glad to be working with people who respected my opinion enough to take my advice when I said I wanted to shoot on a mixture of formats.

I was worried about shooting exclusively on HD for several reasons. I felt the look was wrong: for the really sexy polished look of car ads we shoot 35mm film. There is no substitute for its richness, latitude and lushness of image. There is a texture that is unique to film that the electronically acquired image lacks. I wanted this ad to have a fantasy look, hyper-real, as sumptuous and as ‘bling’ as I could. That for me means film.

I told Juan that the high-speed film stocks available to us would give me the same low light sensitivity as the nighttime HD images he loved, but with added glossiness. We talked about this at length. One of my other concerns was the practicality of shooting with several HD units. There are more cables, batteries, monitors and rigging required; add to this the unfamiliarity of the local camera teams with the kit, and it would cost us valuable time. But I didn’t want to dismiss the idea of HD out of hand.

Time was the over-riding factor on this shoot, as we were to shoot at magic hour and at night. All the wide shots were to look like dusk or dark, but with detail in the sky.

If you watch Collateral, you will see an orange glow in the sky for a lot of the film. This is due to the light pollution in LA. But we weren’t in a big city like LA; we were in the middle of nowhere! They also probably shot at dusk as much as possible. But we only had six nights to shoot and there is only so much coverage you can get in this time, so I was worried about giving Juan what he wanted. As I hadn’t actually seen the location, I had no idea if there was any night time ambient light or not.

I was absolutely sure film was the right way to go, but was concerned that Juan would think I had made a bad call. I needn’t have worried, as he is a very bright and thoughtful guy – and he was very reasonable. He saw my logic and agreed.

I was mulling over any possible advantages of using cameras high-end 4:4:4 2K HD camera systems. In my opinion, the immediacy of seeing the image is the one great benefit over film. Waiting one or two days to see rushes is annoying. I figured that if I could use one of these cameras on the lower contrast shots then it would give us instant feed back and Juan could see exactly what we were getting as we were shooting it. Knowing how good it looked as we were shooting was very reassuring.

Matt Fone, our producer, and I had several conversations about this. He is a creative producer, and he was behind us 100 per cent when it came to trying to push things and being adventurous, even if sometimes it was a pain in the arse. We decided that three main camera units during our shoot would be optimal. We decided on two Arri 435s and a Panavision Genesis. In addition to this, we had an Eyemo modified crash camera, and a Cineflex helicopter-mounted HD camera.

My lens choice was Zeiss Master Primes from Arri. They are so sharp, and the ability to go T1.3 is fantastic. I also had all the Optimo zooms, a Century mini zoom 28-70mm, and a Hawk 150-450mm zoom. For the Genesis I ordered the high-speed Primo prime set and an 11-1 zoom, also excellent lenses. I ordered Kodak 5219, the new Vision3 500T stock.

Lighting decisions

At this point I was still in Italy and had some emails, stills and initial meetings to go on. I was flying out just one week before the shoot and had to make some lighting decisions. As well as the format and cameras, I had to work out in advance how I was going to light the race. The runway was nearly half a mile long, which is a large area to light. In addition, we wanted the option of shooting up to 150fps. It was a far from ideal situation.

In our initial discussions Juan told me he wanted the lighting to look integral, almost as if it had been put up for the race. It had to be lots of small fixtures whizzing passed in shot to give us the feeling of speed. He was very specific about this; he didn’t want it lit by big movie lights. That was fine by me – I always look to shoot into lights if it’s appropriate. I love the flares and nice surprises you get.

So no Muscos or Beebee Lights; in any case I wouldn’t have been able to use them because there is a very strict height restriction at an airport; nothing can block the view from the control tower. What could I use that didn’t look like film lights? I had no idea what I could put them on that wouldn’t look like the usual mess of rigging, towers, cranes, cables and generators.

Another conundrum was what to mount the lights on. I needed them at least 30ft high. But they were in shot. I couldn’t have genie booms, or condors, or scissor lifts or any of the usual stuff. It would look like a dog’s breakfast in shot.

With more time I would’ve asked the production designer Marcus to help me build something, but he was in enough trouble trying to pimp the trucks in three weeks in a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language. He was swamped, but he worked miracles getting those things ready. Some of them were clapped-out wrecks to start with. I think he had over 40 guys working 24 hours shifts as we got to our deadline.

The solution came to me driving passed some large-scale road works. I saw these big floodlights –temporary construction lighting. I did some research and found the construction lighting units (CLUs) came with a wind-up 10m telescopic stand and a generator. Each unit had 4x1000W metal halide lamps. I asked production to source as many as they could; I guessed we needed up to 50 units.

Once in Mexico things moved very quickly. We went to the location and did some light study photography and took Sunpath readings, so we knew minute for minute what the light would do. I admit that the first time I walked out airside at the airport, the scale of it took my breath away. I had provisionally calculated how many lighting units I would need, and the time it would take to set and power them, but this was a reality check. I immediately added six full Dinos and six scissor lifts for fill lighting.

In the background there were mountains with town lights twinkling in the dusk, which would provide Bokehs (out of focus highlights) to give the night shots more depth, and in the other direction the airport and control tower had a decent amount of incidental lighting. It was a good first impression.

I had suspected the CLUs might flicker and this was confirmed after testing, and we had to tie them into a 60HZ synched generators. They managed to find 45 units from various hire facilities. I guessed we needed 40 plus some spares.

Lighting the runway

I spaced them along the left side of the runway at 60ft intervals, which gave me luminance I needed. I wanted a shooting stop around T4 at 500ISO at 24fps. This gave me the option of opening up the high-speed lenses for the slow motion shots, as well as giving my focus pullers half a chance of keeping the long lens action shots in focus. On the far right on the apron and out of shot I put the Dinos, with half and half spot and flood lenses and 1/4 gridcloth diffusion. They were about 200 yards away, and at this distance the light was a beautifully soft underexposed fill. I say fill, but they were actually the key light from most camera angles. The trucks looked sensational in this light, I was very pleased when I took some test shots with my stills camera and the Genesis.

Eric Askens, our 1st AD, was very camera savvy, and always anticipated the camera requirements, which was appreciated. Setting up three cameras and eight airport trucks in various stages of the race to maximize the dusk and twilight was always an issue, so was expertly planned, which meant we managed to get everything we wanted each sunset. We would set up and rehearse in the late afternoon and then when the light was right we hustled to get as many takes as possible. It was always a crazy 20 minutes. For the rest of the nights we shot closer coverage, to tell the story of the race.

The trucks looked splendid. One big problem was their speed. Two of the trucks’ top speed was 5kmh (3mph). The fastest was the luggage train at about 30mph. This was a big problem, as on our schedule there was no way we could replace the engines for something more powerful; these bespoke vehicles just weren’t built for speed. We had to use every trick we knew to try enhance the speed, we under-cranked a lot, we countered the trucks by tracking the opposite way to give the impression of speed. We also tried to get as much foreground movement as possible by tracking fast past the runway lights. We used a variety of tracking vehicles, including a go kart, a quad bike, and a 29ft Techno crane mounted on a truck, with a Scorpio stabilized head. For the aerials we used a Bell 205 chopper with the Cineflex system, which was incredible. This was my first time operating from a helicopter, and it took a few minutes to get my bearings, but the five gyros kept it rock solid, even on the very long end of a long lens. It is the most impressive camera stabilization system I’ve seen.

The benefit of the two sturdy Arri 435s was obvious, I could shoot at any speed at anytime, and in addition I had a third camera with instantly wonderful images. I was sure we had made the right choice: the majority of the film and all set up shots are shot on 35mm with the Master Primes; the aerials are HD with the Cineflex, and there are several Genesis shots, which intercut nicely in the action sequences.

Runway success

Dan Bronks