Diesel, Dust and Bushveld
Director Dan DiFelice with DOP Khalid Mohtaseb, in collaboration with Tony Peterson Films, brought Farm Film an exciting challenge in bringing to life their vision behind the Sony commercial.
ABOVE: BUSHVELD SET UP WITH SFX DUST
Our location, a private farm in the Northern province of South Africa, was pretty close to as real as it gets in terms of engaging with African bushveld. The farm, with wild animals and vast open planes of land, facilitated our needs in terms of a visual language, representing the adventure aspect attached to a safari through the wild.
ABOVE: STILL FROM LOCATION SCOUT
Directory of Photography, Khalid Mohtaseb, often made use of technical camera setups, in order to fully capture the visual essence of our hero’s adventure. Whilst Director, Dan DiFelice, focused on the spirit of adventure, guiding our hero through his performance and creating an edge to the story behind his travels in and amongst the wildebeest. DiFelice upheld a calm and inventive attitude on set, open to locals advice on location and adapting his vision to what was realistically possible whilst dealing with wild animals.
ABOVE: ANIMAL WRANGLER, LUKE CORNEL, HANDLING A PYTHON INFRONT OF CAMERA
Wrangling Wildebeest, variable Camera rigs
The most challenging aspect in engaging with the wild animals on this farm was herding the wildebeest in accordance to how we needed to shoot them and from what angle or point of view we were shooting from. Split amongst what looked like 2 herds, these were wild animals, extremely camera shy and not accustomed to human presence. Moving forward, we needed to adapt our way of working to better suit the customs of the wild.
This meant smaller units, gorilla style, building hides and moving on foot tracking and filming the animals.
ABOVE: AROUND 16 WILDEBEEST MOVING THROUGH THE VELD
ABOVE: STILL IMAGE FROM THE SONY COMMERCIAL
Making use of variable and moving rigs, drones became a fundamental tool in capturing the animals on camera.
ABOVE: DRONE RIG WITH ALEXA MINI
Pulling on our resources from The Pound we used our Pinzgauer, people carrier, to move through the bush, as well as horses and motorbikes.
ABOVE: PINZGAUER AND HORSEBACK RECCE’S
ABOVE: DOP KHALID MOHTASEB LINING UP HIS SHOT
ABOVE: ONE OF OUR BUSHVELD SETUPS
Check out the directors cut here.
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