Director: Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, Partizan
DP: David Ungaro
The brief: A fishbowl floating in the ocean sinks under the surface, freeing its inhabitant to cavort with other fish hundreds of feet below.
The solution: The creative for this challenging Orange piece called for a series of complicated images, ranging from wide landscapes to macro shots at ocean level to underwater scenes. To help him work out the logistics, Partizan's Antoine Bardou-Jacquet recruited his longtime DP of choice.
Here's David Ungaro (Honda "Cog", Honda "Choir") on how he pulled it off:
"The first boards looked scary because we just wondered how we were going to do it. We started by deciding what we wanted to do in 3D and what we wanted to do for real. We collected visual references to try and give the agency [an idea of] what the rendered fish would look like; from books, magazines, and a few wildlife docs, which was put together to make a mood board.

"For me this was different from other jobs because we had to plan the technical things in advance and a little bit more carefully. I didn't want to use divers; it's a long process, it's tiring and you don't get as many shots as when you're over land. When you're shooting underwater and you have a camera operator who is a diver, it's a long process because you have intercommunication with the land. You're telling the guy 'pan right' or 'pan left', and it takes ages.

"We filmed in Malta, because they have a big water tank facility. The deep water tank is around 100 feet deep and 90 feet wide. It's round and the sides are all black, so you don't have a sense of it - it looks infinite. We did all the closeups and the fishbowl stuff in there, because the environment was so much easier to control.

"While we were scouting in Malta, we also made the decision to work on the clarity of the water. Even though it's just a tank, when there's a lot of wind outside all the dust comes up, and it takes three to four days to settle down again.

"We got a crane arm and a remote control head to go into the water from HydroFlex, who do underwater housing and equipment for cinema. [It meant] we were able to control the camera from land and above water and have more freedom with the movements to [make] the shots we wanted. Most of the shots we did from surface level down to 15 feet were done with a remote control camera from the ground, which made it so much easier to be able to change shots and do little moves."