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In today’s motion-graphics-saturated world, work in which the brunt of the footage is captured with an actual camera has become a thing worth celebrating. There’s an almost primal thrill to seeing an effect on screen that you know was created through careful planning and execution in the physical world, and not by using CGI.
Brief called upon two experts in the realm of shooting kick-ass footage to help cull some of the best in-camera projects from 2014: trend-setting creative agency Trollbäck + Company, and broadcast, advertising and digital specialists Wonderful Content. Their choices range from elaborately choreographed stop-motion animation to eerie infrared experimentation.
Film4 Idents
By 4Creative and ManvsMachine
In rebranding Britain’s free-to-air movie destination Film4, ManvsMachine sought to create a film channel rather than a TV channel. They achieved this in a variety of ways, none more striking than a series of cinematic idents that mimic the look and feel of a film spool unwinding on an old-timey projector. As the individual frames of the reel roll past in hypnotic fashion, the Film4 logo gradually materializes within locations the agency calls “live-action compositions.” Finally, a frame locks into place – and that’s when the scene really gets going.
Amazingly, the film reel effect was created on set, using a custom in-camera technique that let ManvsMachine “stack” the same shot on top of itself again and again, changing it a little but each time. Using the technique required that cameras pass through floors and ceilings of scenes shot on sets, and through massive holes dug into the ground at exterior locations.
The results, said Wonderful Creative business director Moray McLaren, are “manna for film geeks and appropriately cinematic. Yes, there are post elements but none that break the spell. These are beautifully shot, eerily charismatic mood pieces.”
The instrumental band Tycho creates surreal, atmospheric musical journeys that seem like they’d be really hard to depict visually. But director Bradley “GMUNK” Munkowitz’ music video for the group’s song “See” does about as good a job as we can imagine.
In addition to telling a fascinating story that feels like some weird, beautiful dream, “the technical approach to this is amazing,” explained Elliott Chaffer, VP of creative at Trollbäck + Company.
Experimenting with infrared lighting, GMUNK discovered that Microsoft’s Kinect is capable of projecting a pattern of dots that make it look like everything on screen is covered in a magical star field – a perfect way to create interstitials of the band performing within the video’s main narrative. The catch was, to pick up this dazzling effect, the camera footage had to be captured in total darkness.
“Even though it was done in-camera, they couldn’t see anything while shooting,” said Chaffer. That meant that not only were the director and crew working blind, but the band members couldn’t see anything either. The result is a pretty ironically wonderful interpretation of a song called “See” and what’s more, explains GMUNK on the company’s website, the lack of visibility “ultimately made the performance feel very raw and unhindered.”
Stop-Motion Parkour
By Corridor Digital
“Corridor Digital, who brought the world Superman With A GoPro, have made this ingenious stop-motion parkour chase film,” said Wonderful’s McLaren. “It’s basically them rolling around in a park. Fun to make; fun to watch.” The results have to be seen to be believed…
MLB on TBS
This epic promo for baseball’s post-season coverage on TBS finds Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston narrating the process, documentary-style, of producing his own one-man show about baseball. No fancy bells or whistles here. Just a fantastic actor committing whole-heartedly to a fantastic script. “Totally unique added value content that turns out to be a giant promo for MLB postseason,” said McLaren. “The essence of great in-camera simplicity: an engaging script and a captivating performance well shot.”
BBC First Rebrand
By Trollback + Company
We asked Trollback + Company to help with this article for a reason: The creative studio is chock full of artists who consistently produce phenomenal live-action work. And no 2014 end-of-year list of in-camera masterpieces would be complete without the brand identity they conceived of for the new drama channel BBC First. To communicate the shifting viewpoints inherent in great dramatic storytelling, Trollbäck came up with a system of shifting panels of lenses and light to guide viewers through the channel’s on-air graphic package. In a series of eerie BBC First idents, the system came to life via a mesmerizing in-camera approach that also paid homage to the power of traditional cinematic storytelling.
Working with master director of photography Fred Elmes, the team used a custom-designed camera rig that allowed them to capture both a rear-projection and a frontal projection of the original footage, and then manually layer the images over each other, “like it was happening against two canvases,” said executive content director Elizabeth Valleau. “We had the images bouncing off big panes of beam-splitter glass that were on little roller skates… so when you look at the idents and you see these multiple exposures happening and you also see these big panes of glass that look like the on-screen package floating across the screen and splitting the images into panes, that’s all real glass, real projections. It’s completely analog.”
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