Director Eric Saarinen of Santa Monica-based Plum Productions loves to travel. So when GSD&M, Austin, Texas, awarded him a Land Rover Discovery campaign (including this week’s Top Spot, "Orbit 3") that called for a three-week-long shoot in Thailand and South Africa, he was eager to pack his bags. The director and his crew were to fly out of Los Angeles on Sept. 13.
But in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the client—Land Rover of North America—pulled the plug on the trip. "The guys from Land Rover said, ‘Nobody who is working on our behalf is going to get on any planes and go anywhere during these times,’ " Saarinen related.
Certainly, Saarinen shared their concerns. Still, the job had to get done: It was decided the spots–all of which feature a 180-degree orbiting camera surveying each scene—would be shot in Los Angeles. Remarkably, watching the commercials, "Orbit 3" in particular," you’d never know the production team didn’t actually travel to exotic international locations to get the exquisite footage.
The :30 "Orbit 3" opens on an archaeological dig in Thailand. As the camera rises up from the earth, we see two archaeologists unearthing a large face below. The camera sails over the scene to give us a frontal view–which finds a Land Rover Discovery parked in the background—and then disappears right into the ground.
In the spot’s second segment, the camera surfaces from under the water. Below, we view a Land Rover being transported on a giant raft somewhere off the coast of Peru. The camera swings over the scene and plunges into the water.
Then, the camera sails up out of the ground at what appears to be an outdoor antique fair somewhere in America. A voiceover says: "The Land Rover Discovery—uniquely equipped no matter what side of the planet you’re on." People are loading a couch into the back of the vehicle as the camera soars overhead in an arc and once again goes into the ground.
Cut to a card that reads Land Rover Discovery accompanied by the voiceover: "Land Rover—the most well-traveled vehicle on earth."
As for the concept, "Land Rover has always been about being all over the world," explained GSD&M senior VP/ group creative director Jeremy Postaer, who served as co-creative director on the project with his partner David Crawford, also senior VP/group creative director. "And the client wanted us to bring home the idea that at any given time there is somebody doing something somewhere in the world with a Discovery, whether it be rescuing people or just loading the groceries."
According to Postaer, the creative team came up with the idea of the orbiting camera after seeing an experimental film that used a similar technique. The only question: Can this actually be done in a commercial?
Saarinen, one of a few A-list directors in contention for the job, said yes. "Everybody else they were talking to was trying to talk them out of what they wanted to do," the director recalled. "They were trying to give them a better idea. But the agency wasn’t looking for a better idea. They thought it was a great idea already."
He agreed, and to prove this idea was indeed doable, Saarinen made a test film on video that featured a 10-inch car and an orbiting camera rig made out of Tinker Toys. "When I saw that, I looked at our guys, and I was like, ‘That’s it. You’ve found your guy,’" Postaer related.
Accomplished special effects expert John Frazier (whose film credits include Pearl Harbor and The Perfect Storm) was employed to build the customized camera rig actually for the job. Ultimately, the real rig weighed 2,500 pounds (that’s not counting 1,500 in weights used to achieve movement). Yet, it was incredibly mobile, noted Saarinen, who said the rig could be packed up and placed into the back of a pickup truck if need be.
Of course, Saarinen had planned to pack up the big rig and take it to Thailand and South Africa. Instead, he wound up carting it around to various locations around Los Angeles.
Initially, it had seemed that achieving the orbiting camera affect would be the biggest challenge on this project. But creating stateside locations—and at the last minute no less—also proved to be a daunting task. "The thing that made it prohibitive to do the job in the United States from the beginning was the fact that you’d have to throw all this art direction in to convince people you’ve been to all these places. And that’s much more expensive than simply traveling to those places where you have decreased production costs, decreased talent costs, decreased crew and equipment costs," noted freelance agency producer Peter Feldman. "The only way we were able to pull it off was everybody recognized that this was something they wanted to do by hook or by crook. No one made money off this job."
A great deal of credit also goes to production designer Sean Hargreaves, Feldman stressed. "He’s one of those really talented young guys who is just bursting out right now. He is one of the reasons we were able to pull off this miraculous thing."
Saarinen enhanced the scenarios Hargreaves whipped up by procuring stock photographs of various backgrounds, which were later seamlessly plugged into the scenes by Flame artist Philip Brennan of Asylum Visual Effects, Santa Monica. Feldman related an example: "In what we call ‘the archeology scene,’ which is supposed to take place in Thailand, Sean designed a great excavated Buddhist head that felt like it had been un-earthed. And Eric found some stock photography that had some similar ruin-type, ancient constructed shapes of heads that [Brennan] placed in the background, which made it feel like this was part of a landscape that had similar archaeological activity going on in the distance."
In terms of the shoot itself, one of the most difficult scenes to lens was one in which the Land Rover Discovery appeared to be floating on a raft off the Central American coast. When Saarinen told Postaer and his team he’d be shooting the scene in the Los Angeles harbor off San Pedro, "We were like, ‘No fucking way,’ " Postaer recalled. "We were out on this raft shooting the other raft, and we were laughing about how this was going to be Eric’s Waterworld."
Joking aside, Postaer said he had great faith in Saarinen, whom he described as "ingenious and resourceful."
And while this production posed problems, Feldman said everyone involved managed to roll with the punches. "Production is always about dealing with the realities of life as it exists. A lot of times, it ends up being a huge budget cut. Sometimes it ends up being a legal snag. Sometimes you don’t have access to a location that you thought you’d have," he said before realizing the irony of his statement. "I guess this is one of those examples," he mused laughing. "We literally didn’t have access to the rest of the world."
