A nasty clown mask features prominently in Adam Berg's frozen film "Carousel" for Philips.

Clown-masked robbers in a high-stakes, low survival shootout with an arsenal of SWAT members rampaging through a busy hospital – cars exploding, bags of money flying – is the spot you’d expect from a Michael Bay-inspired brief. Instead, the communiqué from Philips for “Carousel” leaned more toward the tutorial: the client wanted digital agency Tribal DDB, Amsterdam to create a campaign centering on an “educational website”.

Philips was eager to educate consumers about the features of its new 21:9, billed as the world’s first cinema-proportioned LCD television. Believing that its target audience would be best reached in the digital space, Philips opted to go direct to web with the project.

“Carousel” fulfills Philips’ desire for an educational website, but the teaching material that it uses – the eponymous short heist film produced by Stink Digital, London and directed by Adam Berg – kicks the learning up a notch. The film takes the viewer through one continuous, frozen-moment shot of a robbery gone wrong. Online users have the option of pulling out of the shot to watch clips of actors portraying the director, DP and VFX supervisor explaining the benefits of the cinematic proportions.

“[Stink Digital EP] Mark [Pytlik] and Adam [Berg] came to us first with the technical treatment, which was the idea of using a frozen-in-time technique,” says Tribal DDB CD Chris Baylis. The team agreed that having actors stand very still while shooting in camera would prove more beneficial than simply cheating the idea in post. “The advantage is rather than stop time [in a movement filled live-action film] it allowed us to stop a tracking shot and then jump behind the scenes.”

Tribal DDB creatives wrote the commentary, with input from Stink Digital and VFX shop Redrum, while Berg and the team were busy prepping and shooting over an extremely tight two weeks.

Filming in an old government building in Prague dressed to look like a hospital, the team shot for 13 hours a day over two days. The time crunch led to an unusual, but ultimately beneficial, situation: having post supervisor Richard Lyons and DP Fredrik Backar on hand during the recce.

“Adam had a defined vision so we needed a space that had the geography to work for continual loops,” explains Stink Digital producer Simon Eakhurst. “[Redrum] was there to enable us to make a decision as to what we could cheat in terms of cameras picking up from the end of one move to another. It just meant that we could make a decision whether this space worked well while we were there.”

Having post worries out of the way allowed Berg to focus on the complex motion control shoot. A particularly challenging scene was the transition from the exterior into the lobby, up to the top floor.

“It’s a key moment in the film because it’s where you understand that [the camera’s movement] is not going to stop,” explains Berg. “That was extremely tricky because we had a motion control move that was first going around the back of the guy who is thrown through the glass. But that [shot] needed to be picked up by another move in the middle of the air and we didn’t have enough time to get the motion control upstairs and it didn’t reach that far down.”

To solve the dilemma, the shot was split in two. For the shot up the stairs, a camera was mounted on a crane and manipulated to look like a single moco shot in post. The shot alone took four hours.

Despite the technical challenges, Eakhurst says the production ran like clockwork – somewhat ironic for a spot shot in frozen time. “We were fortunate to be able to have full resources. Normally the DP and the post supervisor would never be out for the recce and scouting,” he says. “That shortcut the process very well, so it was a good call. In pre-production as well, we sat with the motion control people plotting out the best approach to the shoot in terms of which area to shoot first. Working out the best way to shoot the project was the key.” Q

> behind the scenes
Check out the Behind the Scenes blog to read more making-of details from director Adam Berg.

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