VW Golf> "Night Drive"
Director:Noam Murro
DP:Paul Cameron
The Brief: A VW Golf drives through a nocturnal cityscape.
The Solution: Inspired by Collateral, director Noam Murro turned to the film's DP, Paul Cameron and the Genesis HD camera (in its commercial debut) to emulate the film's low lit, ultra-naturalistic lighting, as Cameron explains:

"Noam said he wanted to do a Los Angeles night, but shoot as much available light as he could. He said, 'I like what you did on Collateral, but some of it's too grainy.' I told him that I knew a few tricks in working with the Genesis HD camera. We would only light the car for just one or two images. Fortunately, it was a silver car so I actually lit it with just sodium practicals. The only other lighting in that commercial is a couple of little light effects across a wall, or maybe the cops in the diner had one little kino flow, very minimal. Luckily we got a lot of the moisture we were looking for. It's the moisture in the air that picks up light, that gives that kind of urban glow at night.

"The difference between Genesis and the other available HD systems is that it functions with much less signal to noise problems in super low light, which causes graininess. So at night, even with Collateral, I might have been shooting the exteriors in around 1000 ASA and on the Genesis I got it up to about 2500 ASA. Normally you'd be shooting with 500 ASA film and you push it a stop and the highest you're getting is 1000 ASA.

"In what little lighting you do have, you have to use color to separate or make definition. So if the background's predominantly sodium, I might light the foreground predominantly in mercury vapor, which is blue green and that gives it a bit more depth. It's more about manipulating subtle color shifts to get depth in the frame.

"The challenge was to make the rest of the lighting look like the natural street lighting. Typically with a car like that you might have a hero shot where it drives under a box light or a flying flat, but that would go against the whole vibe of this commercial. So a light that would normally look great for the car doesn't really look like a streetlight would. That was the challenge: don't make it look pretty or anything like you'd expect, do what's right for that location, what's right for that shot."

Sony Blu-Ray> "Lasers"
Director:Brett Foraker
DP:Dan Landin
The Brief: Cool, blue lasers illuminate battle scenes, cars and drum kits brought to the viewer via Sony's new Blu-Ray technology.
The Solution: For Foraker's ambitious laser art installation-cum-ad, he called in the expertise of seasoned heavyweight DP Dan Landin (Sony Bravia "Paint") who had used lasers to breathtaking effect in Wanted directors Warren and Nick's BMW spot "See How It Feels". Here's Landin's account of the shoot:

"We began from a very simple idea to break down the action imagery into a very linear representation. We referenced architectural drawings to look at the way in which form was broken down in a very graphic way and ways you could capture three-dimensional form using very small amounts of information.

"The challenge was trying to define these big action spaces using very little amounts of lights. It was trying to find a balance between making it interesting and conceptual, but not making it so dark that it became an uninteresting space that squandered the resources, that you didn't see a group of soldiers coming at you because you only saw an odd glimmer.

"This is the first project I've shot that was pretty much entirely lit by lasers. We had 26 industrial grade lasers with about 15 different laser operators. They have lots of exciting qualities and problems, not least that they're dangerous. One of the most disturbing things was that all the crew had to wear safety goggles, but, unfortunately, myself and Brett couldn't wear them because once you wore them you couldn't see the lasers.

"We put the lasers through a beam-splitting contraption that maximized them to give you these horizontal and vertical lines that then define the shapes. Then [we applied] very, very small amounts of kino flow in very small areas where it became apparent that you needed to know the surface where people were walking.

"We shot inside an industrial cooling tower in eastern Hungary. It's a concrete cylinder that's approximately 300ft across. We had to shoot at night, obviously, so we used 35mm Arriflexes, but we had a Genesis camera on hand as an option. This was pretty much a 35mm piece shot on a 500 high speed negative."

Motorola> "Hakko"
Director:Fredrik Bond
DP:Ben Seresin
The Brief:In a broodingly lit apartment a man engulfed by menacing wires struggles to free himself.
The Solution: To capture the prerequisite bruised lighting of dusk in a timeless old European city, Fredrik Bond tapped long time collaborator and veteran DP Ben Seresin, who has this to say about the spot:

"For me the production designer is always a huge part of the photographic approach; they work hand in hand. The 'European apartment at dusk' aesthetic was the motivation for the look, but we then wanted to take it to another level. I've really had fun over the last year or two playing with color, much more than I would normally do. I'm a great fan of monochromatic or I'll commit to a very strong theme and a color.

"The whole stage was built on a rostrum to give us more flexibility with camera and lighting. It was all shot in an apartment in Prague with a model which we used as a backdrop outside the window - the attention to detail was phenomenal. The only CG element [of the set] was the sky, which was put in afterwards.

"We predominantly lit through the windows. We had a big bank of soft lights through them and then another bank through the ceiling that gave us that green, moody feel. Then we had about 20 bait lights, which basically faded up and down in sequence giving us our moving yellow effect. It was supposed to emulate the effect of a sign outside the window and gives you the feeling of the light traveling through the frame. It also gave us the flexibility of lighting different areas without re-rigging. It was very, very simple.

"We used an Arri 435 and I shot on Kodak 5217 stock pushed one stop. When I was working on Pirates of the Caribbean, we did lots of tests and we found that there were fantastic results from 5217, which is a medium speed stock. Pushing it one stop gave us much better results than 5218, which is Kodak's high speed stock. It gives a finer grain structure even though the film is pushed. Especially when you're working with visual effects, you need to get the best negative you can, but you still need the speed of the film."