Anthony Dickenson

"in windy South Africa
Life imitates art on Pulse Films' Cape Town shoot for Nationwide, with a random driver crashing into the set while director Anthony Dickenson tries to film as staged collision sequence.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Myself and my producer, Mark Harbour, have been in Cape Town for a few days now. Other than lots of pre-production and one night of debauchery, there is very little to report.

First Test Day

I was really keen to get Natasha Braier to light this project. I had worked with her a few years previously and I knew she would be really excited by the techniques involved.
Natasha arrives at the hotel in the early afternoon and after a couple of hours recouping from her ten hour flight we made our way over to the camera lighting house to rig and test our pick-up truck/car lights. We have four black pick-up trucks, each with a generator and six lights rigged to scaffolding at the rear.

My concern was how to coordinate the opening shot where long exposure traffic streams up and down around us along the dual carriageway. It is approximately a 125 frame shot, each frame being a long exposure of at least 8 seconds. Needless to say the thought of having to drive twenty cars down a 100m stretch of road and back for every frame terrified my producer, and me.

I made the decision to use four pickup trucks with rigged lighting to create the same long exposure effect. I couldn't help think it was kinda cheating but it had major advantages. Now each lane of road only needed one vehicle rather than five and it made the light streaks more regular and less epileptic. Professor Graham Harding would be proud.

After doing various exposure tests we decide the lights we have are too bright and opt for a second test the following evening.


Second Test Day

Mike Skrgatic of Time Based Artists Post Production arrives. Without allowing him a moments rest we take him over to the lighting house to complete our second day of tests. It's a much more successful night. After doing a series of long exposure stills I am left feeling confident about the time we have to co-ordinate our four lane shot the following night.


Shoot Day 1
And so it begins…

Natasha spent all day writing up a detailed lighting plan and schedule including every lights position and power for every separate pass. I had never stopped to consider the amount of separate calculations needed to allow for all our differing frame rates and it was so good to know that it was in such a safe pair of hands.

My brief was to find a 'Michael Mann'esque cityscape with generic structures that could be found in an English city environment. This location had two duel carriageways separated by a large paved expanse. I fell in love with the graphic architecture and the well considered placement of reflective paving stones. It had to be the place.

We had the location for three days. 6pm till 6am each day. The problem with this was that our motion control rig would have to be dismantled and reassembled every day. This could certainly put my post production team in a difficult situation when trying to match passes from different nights. I spoke to Mike and he sounded a little worried. Which made me a little worried.

We arrive on location at five so that as soon as the roads are closed we can begin to lay track and assemble the MILO motion control rig. Jay Mallett from VFX shipped out from London with a MILO rig. He assured me and Mike that shot registration between days would not be a problem. He was most definitely the man for the job.

The art department got to work on cleaning up and altering the road markings.

Once set up we brought in our hero cars to frame up, and began programming the camera move using the Pre Vis as reference.

After a couple of hours of tweaks we had final sign off on the camera move. It is now 2am and we have approximately two and a half hours of darkness left for shooting time. We can now begin to shoot our opening traffic streaking shot. I have calculated that if we can keep to 1 minute per frame it will take just over 2 hours to shoot.

The rest of the night went something like this… Trucks drive, camera exposes, camera moves to next frame, trucks reverse.. and repeat…

Once we were up to speed and had a good rhythm going the hours flew by, well sort of. I get the impression that very few people had a clue what we were doing at this point, no matter how many times I tried to explain. We finished as the first morning light began to seep in to the sky and the streetlights were starting to turn off. A very magical five seconds in real time in the can...


Shoot Day 2
Car crash day. Or not…

A biblical deluge suddenly burst from the heavens. Sheets of rain. Monsoon-esque. This may be a problem, I'm thinking. (my bacon butty was sadly doused and left limp and uneatable…)
Everyone in Cape Town, particularly crew members, are meteorological experts. 'Won't last long' seems the general consensus.

But when is the weather forecast ever right… The rain showed no signs of letting up. Particularly infuriating was the knowledge that just a few streets away there was not a drop of water to be seen.

So it was called a weather day. We hung around anyway, always optimistic and we managed to catch a window of good weather. I decided to go for a slightly different tactic on the co-ordination of our background car light streak elements. Instead of moving frame by frame and resetting the rigged trucks each time, we went for a continuous stream of cars, including all cars and crew we could safely involve. Six cars drove up and down the 150m stretch of road as the MILO moved very slowly and continuously for an hour. A lot of screeching tyres and close calls…


Shoot Day 3
Today is car crash day?

We have four cars for two crashes and one Phantom HD camera to shoot it at 1000 frames per second. The collision is a simple rear ender of a stationary car. We would decide which crash we liked the most, then shoot the timelapse recovery scene for that specific wreckage.

The wind was beginning to pick up a little and our heroic runners were now holding down Natasha's lights and gel's. Our tent nearly upped sticks and floated away a couple of times too.

The first crash went as planned but lacked a little drama. So we decided to hit the stationary car with a little more pace. Mark looked a little worried because if the crash was too violent it would be unusable, and to do the recovery shot of the first crash meant resetting the first two cars. Nobody really wanted to do that. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It worked a treat. So we quickly set up for our recovery shot. The idea is that as the camera pulls away from the accident, recovery vehicles turn up and with the help of some men in high vis jackets, the cars and debris are cleared away. This was shot continuously with 6 second exposures so it was really important that the coordination of movements was planned to the frame. The movement of our high vis recovery man concerned me because it needed to be a considered retracing of steps for each frame. I stepped up and donned the high vis. I looked like an idiot for 45minutes swaying back and forth with the sound of the camera shutter but frankly I think my final performance was truly sublime!


Shoot Day 4
Finally, our artiste, Grant Masters, gets to do his stuff. Or not…

A phone call comes through to the hotel from set - the wind could be a serious issue. Even though there's not a breathe of wind at the Hotel (I'm getting a bit pissed off with this whole Cape Town micro-climate…)

Arriving at the location it is clear that no-one was exaggerating. Gale force winds blasted through the location. Nothing could be set-up. Dinner was perilous.

'It's a north-north-easterly, super hydro-breeze blowing in off Antarctica (or something like that) - you won't be shooting tonight.' I felt a little nervous.

And the long range weather forecast was not looking very hopeful - heavy winds for the following days. We began discussions considering the possibility of shooting our hero character in a studio. Mike looked as concerned as I felt. This really was not ideal.

And then a miracle! The wind just stopped. Just like that. Everyone gazed around, mystified, expecting the wind to return. But it was gone. Our resident Michael Fish's were utterly stumped. Such an event was so rare as to be almost unearthly…

Every man and woman quickly jumped into action and we got Grant out for final checks.
And then a sudden loud CRUNCH! and half the crew are running away from set. Great time for a real life car crash..

A speeding maniac had driven in to the police car blocking our location road. Apparently the driver 'was confused by all the lights.' Hmmmm… Thankfully nobody was hurt, although it was pointed out that had the police car not been there the speeding car would almost definitely have taken out our Motion Control rig. Thank heavens for the police!

And so back to work. It was a real pleasure directing such a consistent and responsive actor. Having the possibility of wind or out of control cars ruining our takes was enough for me. All went smoothly and we managed to escape any more potential disasters.

There was now the small matter of throwing a couple of grand in twenty pound notes into the air for our final shot. This could have been a very quick way to lose a lot of money. Thankfully the wind held off and we got to spend it on the wrap party.

Strange to start a party at six in the morning. Sat by the swimming pool with a cocktail in my hand watching the sunrise is the perfect way to wind down. We maybe managed to wind up the other unsuspecting hotel guests a little though. Oh well..

Four weeks in post later, with Mike and his team working round the clock we finally finish.



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