One of the great things about commercials is that I can go shoot one or two spots a month and wait for the right movie [job]," says Tobias Schliessler, a DP who is represented by The Skouras Agency, Santa Monica, for commercial work. The cinematographer, who regularly moves between spot and feature work, recently completed cinematography duties on Bait, an action comedy directed by Antoine Fuqua, who also helmed The Replacement Killers, and directs spots through bicoastal/international Propaganda Films.
Schliessler, who has lensed a number of visually striking spots for clients such as Audi, Lincoln Financial Group and Citibank, feels that he brings his feature film sensibility to commercials. In turn, he applies what he learns working on commercials to his longform projects. The auto and financial service ads attracted the veteran DP because of their creative possibilities. "I like spots where you can experiment with the look," he says.
"Wake-up" is one of five Audi spots that Schliessler DPed for director Robert Logevall of Bruce Dowad Associates, Los Angeles, via McKinney & Silver, Raleigh, N. C. The beautifully lit spot shows an Audi TT in an elegant setting of foliage, a statuary, fog and water. A poetic voiceover says, "I think I just had a wake-up call and it was disguised as a car. And it was screaming at me not to get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss my life."
"Robert came to me with the idea that the car wouldn’t be moving at all, which is unusual for a car spot," relates Schliessler. Instead of showing the automobile moving through a landscape, "Wake-up" depicts an environment in flux. Graceful panning shots and the play of light rays further enhance the spot’s imagery. "We wanted to show the car organically linked to the landscape. We stylized the environment more than the car," he explains.
The sumptuous look of the spot was achieved in-camera. "We used five different film stocks on that spot, and we used different lab procedures [to get the right look]," says Schliessler, who also praises the work of colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3, Santa Monica.
Motion control equipment was employed for the location shoot, which took place in Los Angeles. For each camera pass, different types of film were used to create images that would portray a changing environment. The visual effects work in the spot mostly consisted of layering the in-camera footage.
