If somebody came up to me and said, ‘We want you to do something exactly like the Sega thing, and we’ll give you a ton of money for it,’ I’d have no interest in doing it," says Brendan Galvin.
Don’t get him wrong. Galvin calls Sega Dreamcast’s "Apocalypse," directed by John Moore of bicoastal Headquarters for Foote, Cone and Belding, San Francisco, one of the highlights of his career—and he certainly isn’t opposed to making money. But he doesn’t like to repeat himself. The Irish cinematographer, who maintains bases in Dublin and New York, and is represented in the U.S. by bicoastal The Gersh Agency, has become known for his versatility. "I don’t know if it’s healthy to categorize people," Galvin says. "Sometimes people are put into things—like people who are specialists in shooting beer. If they want to do that, then fine. But I don’t want to be known as a guy who specializes in shooting beer or hair."
"Apocalypse" is about as far from "shooting hair" as one can get. Presented in letterbox format, the spot looks like a hybrid of Blade Runner and the latest James Bond movie. The plot focuses on a female operative who uses Mission Impossible-style tactics to break into the Sega command center and steal the Dreamcast system. The woman then escapes into the streets of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, and encounters a variety of obstacles before she is thrown from her motorcycle onto the roof of a waiting police car. The visually elaborate, effects-intensive spot (airing as a :90 version and most frequently as a :60) even includes a shot of a plane crashing into a radio tower.
Although many of the effects were done in postproduction, the ad posed many challenges for Galvin. In the command center scenes, Galvin had to work with a set comprised largely of mirrors. Shooting in a studio was "no problem," he says, compared to the chase scenes, which were shot at night in Vancouver, B.C. "Nighttime in Vancouver was only about five and a half hours [long]," he explains. "We had to light three city blocks and do the stuff with the motorbike and the crash in that short amount of time. There was one night when we had two location moves. And with John [Moore], you have to light everything so you can get one hundred frames."
Shooting quickly but sloppily and "fixing it all in post" is out of the question for Galvin. "You can’t just give [the postproduction staff] a mess," he relates. "Why should they spend all that time cleaning that up, when they could be spending the same amount of time improving on something that’s already good?"
Moore and Galvin’s comfortable working relationship contributed to a smooth shoot. "In some ways neither of us really cares about what our titles are," Galvin relates. "I’m called director of photography, and he’s called director. That’s fine. That’s what our responsibilities really are. But we get in each other’s faces a lot. I’m able to do stuff I couldn’t do with other [directors]. He’s able to do stuff he couldn’t do with other DPs. It’s easy for us to work together, because we know each other very well."
Beginnings
Moore and Galvin have known each other for quite some time. "We went to the same college," says Galvin, who left College of Communications Rathmines, Dublin, and entered the film business two years before Moore. "The first time we worked together was on a small picture," Galvin recalls. "I was first assistant cameraman [AC] and he was the trainee."
Galvin eventually teamed with freelance DP Paul Laufer, working with him as first AC on several spots helmed by Tarsem (then with Spots, London; now with bicoastal/international @radical.media). Thanks to Tarsem, Galvin got his first big break as a cinematographer. "There was a job coming up in India [which] Tarsem wanted to do … slightly differently, and he asked me if would I do it," Galvin explains. Having decided to make the move from assistant to DP, he immediately accepted the offer and traveled to India with Tarsem to shoot "Cricket/ Red" for Coca-Cola, via Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Since then, Galvin has served as DP on more than a dozen ads helmed by Tarsem, including "Sarajevo" for John Hancock, which Tarsem directed out of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, Boston. The spot features dramatic footage of the war-torn city, interspersed with uplifting shots of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics. "It would’ve been so easy for it to be a patronizing, cheesy commercial," Galvin observes. "There was a very fine line between it being that and it being very good—and I think it’s very good."
While he enjoys working with Moore, for whom he has also shot ads for clients such as Guinness and Volvo, as well as with Tarsem, Galvin continues to seek variety in the projects he chooses. "I spent the first four months of this year mostly doing commercials," he relates. "Then I realized I hadn’t done music videos in ages, so I did a video for [British pop band] Scritti Politti in New York and a few others, including Jamiroquai. Then I wanted to do some drama. I turned down a lot of very nice commercials to do some films for no money." Galvin recently completed work on the feature film Peaches, directed by Nick Grosso for StoneRidge Entertainment, and says he’ll soon "be screaming to do commercials again."
There’s one thing Galvin won’t be doing anytime soon: taking a vacation. "People always say, ‘Oh, you’re working too hard. You need a rest.’ I don’t know if I agree with that," he says. "Well, sometimes you do need a rest. But other times, it’s just a matter of changing what you’re doing."
