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2 8 C a m e r a
The Sydney Dance Company promo
B E TRANSFO RM ED was the first
TV commercial shot with the
ARRIFLEX D-21 in Australia and
also the first time using the innovative
Mscope mode of the camera.
Sydney Dance Company
When creative agency Area 51 was commissioned
to produce a promotional television
commercial for the Sydney Dance
Company (SDC) as part of FOXTEL’s principal
sponsorship of the SDC, their brief from the
artistic director Rafael Bonachela was to
create ‘visual art’. Photoplay Films Director
Husein Alicajic workshopped a number of
ideas and finally settled on the premise of
transformation. In the spot, a lone dancer
slowly evolves into many, and the dancers’
costumes progress from bare flesh to urban
black attire. According to Alicajic, “I wanted
to convey an arc that investigated the idea
of foetal-like progression.”
The dancers’ organic human form was set
against the stark and geometric minimalism
of the Deutsche Bank building in Sydney’s
CBD. As a corporate sponsor of the SDC,
Deutsche Bank allowed the production to film
on several floors of their modern high rise
facility – a privilege never before afforded to
other filmmakers. Alicajic adds, “I think that
the setting of this piece was very important
to the message that was to be conveyed. The
juxtaposition of the soft human form against
the clinical modernity of the architecture was
something that I wanted to explore. In a way,
the dancers’ journey takes them from the top
of the structure and delivers them down to
the earth where they become more adult
and complete.”
As soon as cinematographer Tony Luu ACS
was brought on board, he knew that this
vision could only be captured in widescreen
ratio. “I was presented with a lot of photographs
of the building’s spaces, which
contained minimalist greys and glass, punctuated
with an exposed steel spine that runs
all the way down the centre of the building,”
says Luu. “There were very graphic lines
throughout the structure, so the camera
needed to present that in a very formal,
designed way. I’d worked a lot with anamorphic
lenses, and I love the softness and
texture that they illustrate. Also the shallow
depth of field is incredible. So when I offered
the idea of shooting anamorphic to Husein
he leapt at the opportunity to try it.”
Luu was left with a number of camera options
to shoot the spot with: 35mm film, Red one,
or the newly arrived ARRIFLEX D-21. “I had
just completed shooting with the D-21 on a
short film called CREATING FORTUNE, where I
was completely blown away by the filmic
quality of this new digital camera. It just
doesn’t look like any other digital motion
picture camera that I’ve worked with. Red
anamorphic doesn’t give you the whole
width of the lens, and the producers felt that
film was a little out of reach. So it was an
easy decision.”
The camera was supplied by Cinoptix, who
had only recently taken delivery of the
camera from ARRI Australia. The D-21 uses a
3K S35mm sensor allowing for recording in
a number of formats to a number of devices.
Takao Hasuike from Cinoptix comments, “The
D-21 can record in 3K ARRIRAW to a solid
state or hard drive recorder like the Keisoku
Giken and S.Two, or in HD in either 4:4:4 or
4:2:2. In the case of this project, it records
in HD to Sony SRW-1 HDCAM SR tape
recorder in 4:2:2 dual stream using the
Mscope anamorphic mode.”
Because the camera has a full-height sensor,
rather than a 16:9 chip, it allows for the use
of anamorphic lenses in the same way as
with 35mm film. The camera also has a
feature that allows filmmakers to squeeze
this anamorphic image into a HD dual
stream, for recording to the Sony SRW-1
deck. ARRI calls this process ‘Mscope’. Tony
comments, “Mscope is an ingenious way to
shoot anamorphic on video tape, because
it allows you to retain as much resolution as
possible through a natively 16:9 recording
format. It splits the 1920x1440 image into
DoP Tony Luu ACS shooting a dramatic
wide angle shot from the crane.