Shooting on a high rise building is a popular task at Germany’s Next Topmodel.

We also took up that challenge and built a whole set above the rooftops of Lisbon for the production of the new O2 & Sony Ericsson commercial for Serviceplan Munich.

“We can do it in post” is a sentence often heard at commercial productions, especially if the board could be realised with a greenscreen shoot. However, we really wanted to capture that “on-location”-feel.

So we ended up on the 15th floor of a shopping mall with a 30 men crew – headed by director Marc R. Wilkins and DoP Sten Mende. They realised Serviceplan’s idea with one RED and three Nikons.

It became clear that the typical O2 sky together with a lit-up city could only be caught right after sunset. A difficult task since time to get all relevant shots would be limited to 30 minutes, to short to film a whole commercial. To play it safe, we shot the backgrounds as 360 degree HDR images, and replaced city and sky during postproduction.

In order to create a realistic and beautiful lightwriting, we worked with long exposure photography during the shoot and combined it with 3d lightwriting for the VIVAZ-logo.

Sorry, but today we don’t have a picture for you… although we have the finished spot.

Claudio Weber
Tagged commercial, director, Germany’s Next Topmodel, O2, parasol island, Parasol Island Blog, serviceplan, Shoot, Sony Ericsson, Spot