Aero's O'Hare Makes Alaska Shift

Aero's Sam O'Hare Makes Alaska Shift
 
An anthem spot for Alaska Communications seeks to make a big place
look small and cozy. What better way than with tilt-shift photography?
 
By Anthony Vagnoni
 

Aero Films Director Sam O'Hare used tilt-shift techniques for this Alaska Communications spot.

How do you take a land as expansive as Alaska and bring it down to size, making it feel small and cozy in the process?  If you're the San Diego office of Vitro and the telecommunications company Alaska Communications, you look for a technique that can, in a sense, shrink the 'bigness' of the state and make its people seem part of a smaller, more closely-connected world.
 
That was the idea behind a new sixty-second spot titled "Anthem," recently directed by Sam O'Hare of the L.A. and New York-based Aero Films.  The spot – the first of a planned four commercials – uses the tilt-shift technique to condense the depth of field in the frame, creating a sense of everything being in miniature. The spot's vignettes of scenes around Alaska show people swarming along a magnificent beach below a waterfall, or milling around a state fair, all looking like tiny little characters you might see on a model train set.
 
O'Hare has produced a number of tilt-shift shorts prior to being awarded this campaign, and says that one of the reasons he won the job was that clips from his work were on a reel the agency shared with the client.  His short films include "The Sandpit," produced in 2009, which captures various scenes in New York City and has become something of a viral hit.  That project led to a second tilt-shift film, this one produced in 2010 for the Coachella music festival. Titled "Coachelletta," it captured scenes around the arts and music festival and was posted to the Coachella web site.

Steamshovels look like toys in O'Hares "The Sandpit," a look at scenes around New York City.

As with O'Hare's other tilt-shift work, the technique was created for the Alaska Communications spot largely in post, working from thousands of stills that O'Hare shot using a digital SLR set to capture four frames per second. He organizes the stills and compiles the frames into footage, stabilizes it and adds a basic depth of field effect to provide footage for the edit. Once the cut is locked, he goes back to perform color grading and to fine-tune the depth of field falloff.

O'Hare says that the advantage to creating the tilt-shift look in this manner is that you can vary and control the degree of the effect – it let him massage the focal disparities between foreground, center and background sections within each frame, essentially 'coloring' the frame with varying levels of focus and enhancing the miniaturization effect.


Tilt-shift photography is named for the ability to rotate (tilt) or move (shift) the lens of a camera relative to the film or sensor. Tilt can be used to selectively throw parts of the image out of focus, which can produce the "miniature" effect. O'Hare has experimented with the lenses, and remarks that for the miniature effect they work best on mostly flat scenes, or those primarily in one plane. Scenes with vertical objects appearing in a horizontal space are less successful, as the objects fall out of focus incorrectly. Using the post technique instead allows these scenes to be treated more closely to how they would fall out of focus were they actually miniature.
 
On the Alaska shoot, O'Hare's EP, Sara Eolin, notes that much of the footage was captured from a helicopter, working with a Cineflex rig.  "It's a technique Sam has been eager to try out," she says.  "It also proved to be a handy tool in getting around the islands and fjords that make up a lot of the area around Anchorage and Juneau, where the production was based." Tilt-shift tends to work best when shot from high angles, she adds.  "The wider your shot, the higher you need to be," she notes. 

The director says tilt-shift can have the same space-altering appeals as time-lapse.

In addition to directing the spot, O'Hare edited it at the Aero offices in New York, where he worked with a team that included Andy Gilbert, Jesse Holmes, John McLoughlin and Hannelore Williams.  O'Hare says it was actually under 2 weeks to do all the edit, post and ship the spot.
 
O'Hare's "Sandpit" short has screened at a number of film festivals. It features original music from human, co-written by Rosi Golan and Alex Wong. On that production, O'Hare shot all the stills himself, often using a portable tripod but at times hanging off of bridges, roofs and apartment balconies. On the "Coachelletta" short he was stationed in a cherry picker above the crowd, which allowed him to move while the camera was clicking away.
 
Chatting on the Aero Films blog, O'Hare explains what he likes about the tilt-shift technique and why he applied it to the streets of Manhattan: "I've always loved time-lapse footage, and films like 'Koyaanisqatsi' especially, which allow you to look at human spaces in different ways and draw comparisons between patterns at differing scales. I also really liked the tilt-shift look of making large scenes feel small, and wanted to make a film using this technique with New York as its subject."  (For more on O'Hare's work, click here.)
 
There's been relatively few uses of the tilt-shift technique in TV commercials. Leo Burnett's Chicago office used it in a spot for Allstate insurance titled "Multiples," directed by Keith Loutit and produced by Partizan.  (It was also used by Bent Image Lab Director Chel White in a 2006 music video for Thom Yorke titled "Harrowdown Hill.")
 
O'Hare thinks he knows why.  "Tilt shift lends itself to a certain kind of approach, and for this campaign, the concept backed it up, which was taking a large place and making it feel smaller. But it's not the kind of technique that you could just use for the sake of it. It really needs to mesh with the idea."

Published 28 August, 2012