The Burger King project came to Shelmerdine with a very specific element in mind: make it dark. The agency had in fact already sold the more menacing concept to the client, and BK was looking forward to putting a spin on a normally sunny approach.
“99 percent of the time clients want an idyllic style applied to their advertising,” says the director, “with really no thought of playing with the effectiveness of more suspenseful moods. This time, Burger King was totally on board for taking a different tack."
A two-week prep period culminated in a two-night long shoot – one night at a hotel about an hour outside Los Angeles and another up at Griffith Park in LA. Executed on a 1:85 ratio or letterbox, the challenge for Shelmerdine was to extract any kind of pre-determined emotion the viewing audience may sense once the commercial began. “The goal was to entice them into a totally new environment where there was no initial sign of any comedic moment,” says the director. “Everything was tailored to mislead the audience and capitalize on the idea of surprise.”
In order to effectively achieve the suspenseful affect, Shelmerdine and DP Sebastian Pfaffenbichler/aac turned to KODAK VISION2 500T Film – a low-contrast, low-color film that provides smooth flesh tones and superb shadow detail. With a wider screen enabling the two to draw out more dramatic moments, the stock supplied the exact silhouette while highlighting the mysterious detail they were looking for.
“I usually always work with Kodak stock,” says Pfaffenbichler, “and for this concept I chose the VISION2 500T Film because I like the grain structure very much. It gave me the latitude in the blacks and deep shadows to underexpose and shoot with a minimal amount of lighting to achieve a very realistic feel and texture. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”
The director agrees: “It was so imperative for us to evoke the right amount of suspense from the get go,” states Shelmerdine. “And the VISION2 500T Film performed extremely well with our low lighting and need for grain.”
Utilizing VISION2 film was in part inspired by the Coen Brothers film “No Country for Old Men.” Fascinated by the overall look and feel of the film, which was shot on KODAK VISION2 Color Negative Film 5217 & 5218, Shelmerdine wanted to enhance the Burger King storyline by capturing that same edginess and darkness.
The quickness of the shoot – and the race against losing the lighting effect on large scenes was the biggest challenges facing the crew. Whether in the hotel – or at the park - the capture points directly to the cohesiveness of the creative elements coming together to produce a strangely provocative short story. Dark, brooding, and suspenseful, the foreboding narrative played out flawlessly on the Kodak stock.
One would have thought that the star of the campaign was the angry cow created by Stan Winston Studios. But because of the multiple variables facing the crew, it was the film stock that proved to be the headliner. “Kodak truly has the most innovative, most reliable, most versatile stock – and they are always bettering their product, even with the looming advancement of HD,” added Shelmerdine. “And it certainly didn’t hurt that their customer service always rocked.”
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