St. Mary's Campaign: "Never Fear", "Trust" and "Victories".

I have shot a number of health care spots with director Ron Hamad. This campaign of three spots rely on a twist at the end to make the connection between staff at St. Mary's and how much each of them cares for their patients. For example in the "Trust" spot the audience is lead to believe that the patient is interacting with her husband next to her, when in reality it is her St. Mary's surgeon that she has been speaking to the whole time.

It takes a lot of effort to take a typical patient rooms scenario and somehow find a rational means to shoot the story in a more dynamic and visually interesting way. On location scout days, Ron and my self photograph the hell out of every location, then sit together in the hotel at night to figure out which angles will best serve the story. We then compile new story boards based on our location pictures, then take the story board to the 1st AD and figure out the best order for our shot list, to maximize our location time, lighting time and overall efficiency on set.

We had two days to shoot three spots. 10 hours for the 1st day spot, 5 hours each for the second day spots. We planned to finish the 1st days work in less than 8 hours, so that we could pre light for two hours with the lighting and grips crew for the following day.

We shot the spot on SR3, Super 16mm camera. Because 16mm has twice the depth of field as 35mm, I used 16mm Zeis 1.3 primes, and shot at a very shallow depth of field to mimic the characteristics of 35mm film. I used Kodak Vision 250 Daylight stock. On 16mm film I seldom use higher then 250 ASA film stocks, as I am not a fan of grain. All three spots where covered with between 13 to 18 camera set up's per spot.

This campaign for St. Mary's was particularly refreshing in it's strength conceptually, and I, Director Ron Hamad and Senior Producer Les Wells of Film Yard Productions were all very psyched up to push our selves creatively on every level.