Brand: Scorpion Helmets
Agency: Marshall Advertising
Creative Director/Copywriter: Roger Feldman
Sr. Art Director: Mike Voornas
Senior Account Executive: Steven Shearer
Director: Alex Ardenti
Director of Photography: Daron Keet
Editor: David Checel, Cut & Run
Colorist: Shane Reed, Riot
The purpose of the spot is to demonstrate Scorpion Helmet's superior ability to absorb sweat. The story conceived by Marshal Advertising's Creative Director/Copywriter Roger Feldman and Sr. Art Director Mike Voornas is set against a sizzling hot California desert. The spot features a super hot gas station attendant who is sweating (played by World Fitness Champion and International Model Timea Majorova) as she waits for an equally hot lone biker. The commercial is directed by veteran photographer and first-time TV commercial director Alex Ardenti.
Alex wanted to ensure the spot incorporated the aspects of the beauty lighting his photographic work encapsulate. Although his photographic work is captured on digital format still camera, I convinced Alex that commercially our best beauty look would be achieved through using a full frame super 35mm film camera. 35mm film gives you the most nuanced, logarithmically captured information, allowing you the most control in doing a very aggressive telecini color correction grade, with out contaminating your image.
Alex wanted a Ridley Scott type atmospheric smoke look with shafts of hot piercing light. The biggest challenge however was that we had working motivated fans on set, which where characters in there own right as subtext to the sweltering heat. Of course fans and smoke do not mix, so we never quiet achieved the level of atmospheric smoke we envisioned.
To ensure we had a hot blown out feel to the imagery I exposed the negative to have our whites at the Zone 10 point on my Pentax spot meter, and made sure every frame had pure white highlights exposed in them.
We used Kodak 5246 - 250 daylight film stock plus large HMI's with a spot lens to augment the hot and sweaty motif we were going for. The slow motion, hair-blowing scenes where shot at 60 frames per second. Our 1st class Arri 435ES [Super 35mm] camera, Zies ultra primes and Angeneux Otima zoom lenses were supplied by The Camera House. Camera moves were executed on a Fisher 10 dolly and a 6 foot camera slider. The finished spot includes 18 executed camera set up's, shot in Lancaster within a 10 hour day.
