Behind the scenes of our Christmas Advert PART 2

Chris Porter - Director

Day 2 of 3 was certainly our most challenging day. Myself and the team would be lying if we weren’t slightly daunted by the prospect of building many of the 100’s of flat packed cardboard boxes that lay in front of us on a chilly Tuesday morning. However with a ‘production line’ system, we ended up rattling through at least a hundred - enough to fill the back half of the van we had rented for todays proceedings.

Our first shot required a back street type location, which rather handily we sourced from around the back of our offices. A simple two shot sequence and we were off. Using natural light and a reflector to reduce some of the shadows from the actors face, we were happy with the first shots of the day.

The days shoot was all about volume of locations, with minimal shots at each. We needed to build the feeling of extensive travelling from our ‘Santa’ which meant that we had to pack in a lot of places prior to our end scene - so we were very much racing the light.

We were lucky enough to secure an art gallery from our friends at Nova Fine Art for one of our cameo scenes. A surprisingly difficult scene to light as by any galleries nature, the walls are brightly lit with hotspots a plenty due to the many small spotlights shining on the artwork.

We went with an Aperture 120D paired with the lantern to give a soft ‘not noticeably lit’ look. In hindsight and if wee had more time, I would likely have done this differently and repositioned the light so we were shooting more on the ‘dark side’ of the face - a common technique to apply more contrast to the scene. However time and space didn’t allow for as much tinkered as I would have liked - one to learn from, perhaps having a floor-plan of the space ahead of time would have helped us plan better on this one.

For our next cameo scene we were fully in run and gun mode. We spotted a street with incredible sun setting light, so a quick burst on the walk talkies, we descended on the sleepy street for our tw shots required. As any filmmaker in golden hour finds - you just can’t resist shooting more with the light, so we actually got a few extra shots for different areas of the film in the can. A happy accident!

Watch the video in full below to see how we mounted the camera in various positions on the van for our key travelling shots, swell as us wrestling with a cheap but effective amazon snow machine!

As always, the full Christmas film can be found below