Product: Ecko Unlimited
Director: Jack Wung
Producer: William Butler-Sloss
DP: Daron Keet
Flame Artist: Fefo De Souza
Editor: Adam Svatek, Filmcore
Post-Production: Amburr Dilday

Jack wanted to capture Ecko in a raw, gritty, yet natural style, punctuated with edgy camera movement. I am not a fan of the counterintuitive approach to capturing handheld footage in a free-flowing, haphazard way, but prefer movement that has a semblance of control, thought and structure in its approach. I utilized a bungee rig at the end of a ubangy on a dolly to ensure I got the energetic movement with a kind of natural roughness, while still maintained strong composition.

Because the spot required the creation of an invisible man that would later be created by the awesomely talented flame artist Fefo De Souza at Vendetta Post, much of our work required motion control. [seven motion control shots out of the 30 setups in the two-day shoot.]

In keeping the motion control shots within the integrity of our established edgy look, I would dial into our created motion control move a slightly shaky, handheld pass. I achieved this by firstly working out a smooth camera move, saving it, then asking the motion control technician to record a 5-second clip of me randomly shaking the motion control joystick around, to capture the desired in-camera rough inertia- type movement.

Our invisible man was designed by shooting a live actor in a green lycra suit, and painting even his face in a matching green. He was captured on a motion control camera rig, so that we could do two camera passes, one with background only, and one with background and invisible man. I often exposed or lit each pass differently to ensure Fefo had the most information to work with in post. I had the benefit of Fefo on set at all times to ensure he was getting exactly what he needed to create the most realistic invisible man possible. As per Fefo's instructions, I shot all motion control shots at 60 fps so that he had the most frame information possible to work from. The footage was transferred at Riot at 50 fps so that Fefo had the frames he requested, but the footage did not retain the slow-motion look 60 fps would create when transferred normally at 24 fps.

Because Jack wanted a black-and-white commercial, a lot of thought went into wardrobe to ensure we had juxtapositioned dark-on-light colors in our compositions and styling. I used Fuji 250 daylight color negative film [8562] as the commercial's palette and had the color sucked out of the film in post. Having used 35mm black-and-white film stocks in the past, I still find I get the best black-and-white tonal range from using 35mm color film's incredible exposure latitude to help me get to the black-and-white tones I like. I feel black-and-white images need to be exactly that, not gray and white. I find the standard black-and-white motion film stocks render very insipid gray and white images even when using orange and red filters.

Although we cast many actors to play roles as the characters reacting to the invisible man, we always planned to capture street onlookers unaware, for those absolutely natural, completely uncontrived moments. We lucked out and many of these planned yet unplanned moments are very much the character and heart of the Ecko commercial.