Imagine a camera phone so powerful it has the ability to disrupt the time-space continuum, causing bumper cars to whiz through a library, a never-ending army of babushkas to ride an office escalator and ornate chandeliers to appear dangling from a gas station shelter. This is the stuff advertising is made of - specifically "Caught on Camera", McCann Erickson, London's first global TV campaign for Sony Ericsson since the agency won the $160 million account in January.

Designed to push the high-quality photo capabilities of the new C902 Cyber-Shot cell phone in 36 markets worldwide, the ad is a series of vignettes in which recipients of photo text messages suddenly find themselves in incongruous surroundings or, even more alarmingly, sucked into a mobile phone and spit out somewhere else. For instance, a basketball player lands in a beauty salon and a graffiti artist turns up in a corporate boardroom.

When Blink, London's directing trio Lynn Fox got the script, they started brainstorming unexpected juxtapositions that could mostly be executed in-camera, but would require diverse locations: indoor, outdoor, urban, rural, day and night. The producers drew up budgets to shoot in the service centers of Cape Town and Buenos Aires, eventually deciding on the Argentinean capital.

"We preferred to go to South Africa, but the final decision was purely a commercial one," says Lynn Fox's Bastian Glassner. "We got an extra day shooting in Argentina for the same budget." Glassner says there can be difficulties in location shooting in BA, as "local councils and administration people there aren't so film-friendly."

Restrictions on weekday shooting in Buenos Aires' central business district and other main arteries meant the ad's big, downtown scenes had to be filmed on the weekend, says Maria Jose Garofali, a producer with Buenos Aires-based Pioneer Productions.

"Each location had a restriction - it was possible to shoot only at night, or only on Mondays, or only weekends," she says. "As soon as you start putting everything together on a schedule, you start making major decisions from which, in some cases, you cannot go back on and that affects the whole sequence. It is crucial to have a very good AD who can put together everything and is able to anticipate things and react quickly."

In all, the seven-day shoot required 20 locations for 11 scenes, 32 principal cast members plus 200 extras and a crew of 100, including a team of 15 from the United Kingdom. After an extensive pre-production phase, the creative team from McCann arrived in Buenos Aires in April and was impressed with diverse locations, including the foyer of the University of Buenos Aires' law faculty, a canal north of the city in the suburban enclave of Tigres and a graffiti-covered electrical station in the trendy Palermo district.

Though Lynn Fox emphasized in-camera tricks in their treatment, a few ideas proved too elaborate. One case in point was a scene that only appears in the Chinese market cut: a fireworks display inside the law faculty foyer starring a popular Chinese starlet named Xu.

The fireworks would be set off outside and then added into the interior scenes in post. The law faculty hall is full of 25-meter tall glass windows, impossible to black out for a daytime shoot. A night shoot was arranged, with a fireworks display scheduled for between 11pm and 1am. However, the pre-light of the sizeable hall wound up consuming the better part of the night, pushing the fireworks to just before dawn.

"Even with permits, government authorization and security measures taken, it's impossible not to bother anyone in a city with fireworks at 5am," says Garofali. "It was amazing for us, scary for the neighbors."

Another challenging scene involved a killer whale leaping out of a canal in the middle class neighborhood of Tigres, about 30 kilometers north of central Buenos Aires - a picturesque locale for a stressful shot. Though the whale would be added in by Framestore CFC's VFX team, the shot required a four-tonne iron weight to replicate Willy's massive splash.

"On shoot day, the water had dropped by almost two-and-a-half meters, meaning there was three feet of water," says McCann, London AD Jay Phillips.

"We could've done a simpler vignette that wouldn't have caused such a dilemma," adds the spot's copywriter, Neil Clarke. "There were certain issues with light and replicating enough movement in the water. There was so little time for post and the jobs were mounting after every scene for the guys at Framestore."

But the Foxes were convinced it would work, and after 10 hours, they made a big splash. By shoot's end, the creative team credited their client's demanding 12-and-a-half-week turnaround time for the whole campaign with forcing all involved to work efficiently. "Things had to be ticked off and yes-ed more than debated," says Phillips. "That stops all pondering and second-guessing, which is good because that's what usually halts a production."

GOOD TO KNOW
Currency: 1 USD = 3.021 ARS (Argentina pesos)

Local talent: The graffiti mural featured in the ad was on the side of a remote power station outside the city and created by local graffiti/animation duo Kid Gaucho. Formed in 2002 by graphic designers and illustrators Lucas Lasnier and Andrés Bonavera, they've also created work for adidas, local broadcasters and the onedotzero festival.

McCann Erickson, London http://www.mccann.co.uk
Blink Productions http://www.blinkprods.com
Pioneer Productions http://www.pioneerproductions.com.ar