__twocolumncontent.jpg)
“Life is messy, but life is beautiful,” Discovery Communications SVP of Marketing Doug Seybert told Brief in January, following Discovery Life’s debut as an uplifting destination for shows about the human experience.
Seybert’s sentiment was powerfully expressed in a captivating brand anthem spot that spearheaded the network’s new look and feel. Conceived by Discovery Communications’ internal creative team and executed by IKA, the spot, titled “Love Every Step,” pursued an objective no less ambitious than capturing the entire arc of a life, from one woman’s childhood to the birth of her own daughter, in 60 seconds. Not only that, it sought to do so from the point of view of the female protagonist herself, immersing viewers in a way that feels like we are experiencing life with her.
See for yourself:
“The thing with a POV spot is it can’t just look like real life,” said IKA founder Ian Karr, who directed and edited the spot. “It has to feel like real life. Otherwise you don’t really buy it… My vision for it was to make it feel like real life, not just look like real life.”
Karr employed two primary strategies to achieve a vibe that was “as close to a real POV as possible,” he said. The first strategy, not surprisingly, involved the camera work – namely, finding an alchemy of equipment and operational logistics that would best mimic “the geometry of the way we really see,” Karr said. From the start, the director knew that to create a truly immersive experience, the camera would need to be attached to the head of the actress playing the spot’s protagonist, allowing the viewer to almost literally move through the action with her.
After experimenting with an array of cameras, ranging from a Cannon 5D to a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, Karr and his director of photography Bill Winters determined that “the thing that felt the most real was the GoPro,” said Karr. “I think because we were able to get the center of the lens very close to between the actress’ eyes. There’s a subtle difference that happens when you turn your head – if the camera is offset or a little bit higher, there’s something subconsciously that registers [in the viewer] that the motion is just not right; there’s something about the POV being in the center of that fulcrum.
To increase the quality of the image without sacrificing the hard-earned authenticity, Karr filtered the GoPro’s feed through an Odyssey 7Q recorder running at 48 frames per second. In post, Karr proceeded to edit the footage at 24 frames per second, which visually speaking, effectively “doubled up what was there,” he said. “It gave it a touch of hyper-realism.”
One drawback to GoPros is what Karr called a “bendy” lens that gives a “super fisheye” appearance to footage shot on them. Seeking a more natural look for the spot, Karr’ team mounted the camera’s circuit board to custom-fitted lenses that get progressively tighter as the spot moves along. In the opening moment from a baby’s perspective, the frame is stretched as one might imagine it would be from an infant’s still-devleoping point of view. By the time the protagonist is full-grown, all bendiness is gone, reflecting the fully formed vision of an adult. Things come full circle by spot’s end, when the protagonist has her own kid, and the stretched view returns in a call-back to the magically distorted world view of youth.
The second strategy Karr used in the pursuit of realism involved the spot’s lighting, which needed to feel un-staged and spontaneous without feeling amateurish. To that end, Karr settled on shooting with available light as opposed to professionally lighting each scene, then added what illumination was still needed in post, during a process known as color grading.
“Bill [Winters] essentially lit it without lighting it,” said Karr. “It’s not too much. It’s enough for exposure but it doesn’t look like available light either.” By “detuning the art direction, detuning the lighting and then selectively bringing things up in the color grade,” he continued, the effect creates something similar to “how your brain works. Your brain takes in a whole scene but you selectively focus on different things depending how important they are to you.”
The process of detuning extended all the way into the actors’ performances, which relied heavily on improv to make each moment feel spontaneous. In casting his leading lady, whom we never actually see, Karr looked for an actress with a “girl-next-door” quality who could also move with the skill of a dancer. His final choice, Claire Hampsey, would prove to have all that plus the bonus, un-teachable ability to be “excellent at being a camera platform,” said Karr. “She really understood eye line. Even though the camera was very close to her eyes it wouldn’t always be in the exact right spot because your forehead isn’t perpendicular to the ground.” In the scenes with her husband, for instance, if Hampsey had been looking directly at him while wearing the GoPro, the image captured would be unsettlingly high. In the proposal scene, we the viewer are looking directly into his eyes, while the subject of his affection was in reality “looking at his feet,” said Karr. “It was completely unnatural. She did a phenomenal job.”
Hampsey’s ability to express character from behind the camera reaches an explosive climax at the moment she is struck by the truck. For this powerful sequence, Karr sat in the car with Hampsey as she drove, cuing her to snap her head to the left as she entered the intersection, noticing the onrushing truck just before it struck her. The effect is fast and extremely subtle, but her naturalistic work here helps sell the visceral power of the collision, making us feel as though we are right there with her.
Hampsey’s performance was made trickier by the fact that the truck was, naturally, not actually approaching her during the shot. Instead, it was added in post through computer graphics, an impressive detail considering the vehicle looks utterly lifelike in the spot. Karr said its realism was accentuated in part by an app called 360-Panorama, which enabled him to enter the intersection and take a full panorama image using his iPhone. With that image, his effects team was able to then create the reflection of the protagonist’s car in the truck’s windshield. Though the entire accident happens in an instant, the detail of that reflective surface, combined with a bone-jarring sound design, “really helped sell it,” said Karr.
Through meticulous planning, Karr and his team produced an anthem spot that feels organic and unplanned. “It was all about un-learning what we’ve learned in our business, which is to control everything,” said Karr.
What they ended up with codifies the Discovery Life objective, which is to “tell the story of life’s most challenging and rewarding moments,” said Matt Kendis, marketing creative director for Discovery Communications. “We wanted to make sure our introduction to the brand was relatable, immersive and an experience to remember.”
Tags: