Surprise visits the heart of Australia and beyond.

A highlight from 2017 was the opportunity to travel to Uluru/Kata Tjuta & Broome to film a Tourism Australia campaign. I was working as second unit DOP along side a german team (german devision of Tourism Australia). 

The brief was to capture the surprise moment when a competition winner (a working visa holder in Australia from Germany) is reunited with there family that had been secretly brought to Australia to surprise there child. 

The subject matter was electric and spontaneous to film with a "one take only" approach to capture the raw emotion, not to mention the superb vistas to frame it all in! 

Tick one or two things off my bucket list on the trip which is always a bonus when your getting paid to be there. 

Below are the two content pieces from the campaign plus some snaps from the adventure. 

Theres a bear in there...

One of the last jobs I did for 2017 was a series of content/TVC's for Wilson Storage. 

It was a fun and playful brief with a few challenges in terms of lighting, framing and camera rigging.  

One challenge was a POV shot of a Wilson Storage box as it makes it way from being packed at home, loaded into the van and then walked through the facility and into its new home. 

Using a magic arm and super clamp we attached the box to the camera via the support rods. We had to cut the bottom half of the box off to bring down the weight and size so moving around was easier. Because we cut the box in half it became quite flimsy so we had to rig up a small lighting flag to the inside of the box to both give it some rigidity and something for the clamp to hold on to. 

Another challenge was the internal shot of the bear being removed from the box by the owner. If you ever want to challenge you coordination and spacial awareness, try looking at a monitor and adjusting the framing of a shot when the camera is in the opposite direction to your normal state of operating. it took a while to grip the camera into place then even longer to make adjustments to get the right framing. its was a real mind bender. 

Check out the the final two videos and some behind the scenes stills below.