When viewed in close-up, any object—a strawberry, a wristwatch, or kitchen utensil—can become a strangely beautiful landscape, a new world that only the camera can discover. Many commercial directors who specialize in tabletop spots are exploring their territory with a new medium—high definition (HD) cameras—and they say their business must change rapidly to accommodate the new views.
"Edgy and tabletop are two words seldom said in the same sentence," says director/cameraman Bruce Nadel of bicoastal OneSuch Films. "Tabletop is almost a dinosaur in the minds of agency people who haven’t grown up with it. That’s why it’s so hard to keep it fresh." So Nadel, like many in his field, has been experimenting with HD cameras, and trying to convince agency personnel that the electronic method can work as well as film. Though HD is cheaper and in many ways simpler to work with in production, it is often met with resistance.
"I’m constantly trying to get clients to embrace HD, because it’s right around the corner," says Nadel. "The suppliers of equipment are all geared up to do spots in HD. But because you can still shoot and edit on film and then convert it afterwards to HD, the urgency has been taken out of the conversion process. Another thing is that people still call HD ‘video,’ when it’s an entirely different animal. It’s hard to convince agency people who still think that HD footage looks like videotape—cold and flat."
Nadel has completed two projects entirely in HD: Sprint’s "Bad Day" via Hoffman York, Milwaukee, and a three-spot, non-tabletop package for RoommateFinders. com. The dot-com client didn’t go for HD, Nadel says, until he told them how much more they could accomplish with their modest budget. "There are a lot of people looking to promote HD," he says. "[Some] equipment houses will lend equipment, and that cuts costs. So suddenly the client loved the idea."
Experiment
At Bates USA, New York, John Caffera, senior VP/director of broadcast production, didn’t wait for a budget crunch to dictate the method of filming. Caffera conducts monthly seminars for the agency’s creative and production departments, and he recently asked director/cameraman J. Wesley Jones of Wall To Wall Films, New York, to conduct an experiment. The mission: to shoot footage of fresh and cooked food with film and HD cameras, and edit the footage for a side-by-side comparison.
Though Caffera and Jones hadn’t worked together on any spots, Caffera knew that the director had been doing such experiments on his own for a couple of years. The finished footage has close-up shots of fresh fruit, breakfast food, pizza, and beverages, first in a five-minute film segment. Then the scenes are repeated on HD. Next, on a split-screen, the footage is run side by side for a direct comparison. Finally the two methods are intercut, demonstrating how well they can be blended. The differences are hard to detect, except in some close-up shots of strawberries and raspberries, whose surfaces seem more irregular and shadowy when seen via HD.
"The results were impressive," says Caffera. "Shown side by side, it was almost imperceptible. The HD looked film-like, and it had a depth and richness that was similar to film. It wasn’t an exact replica, but to the untrained eye, it looked awfully close. Yes, I could tell which was which, but I was impressed by the warmth he was able to get with HD. It had a resolution greater than what I thought it might have.
"I credit Jones with being the expert in this," Caffera continues. "He’s been able to achieve something that’s beginning to approximate film. It impressed me how beautifully and subtly he could light things, and kind of sculpt the light around the food."
The maxim among camera operators is that film softens and beautifies, while video sharpens and magnifies every tiny flaw. HD is thought to cast an even more brutal eye on reality. That’s great for the smooth, regular surfaces of machinery—but food, when examined too closely, can become not only unappetizing, but scary. How did Jones make the new medium more forgiving?
To start, he adapted film lenses for use on the HD camera, and tried to light the tabletop scenes as though he was shooting film. He also experimented with shutter speeds and filtration until the HD footage achieved a flattering look. "I think a lot of people were surprised that [the HD footage] had a beautiful quality. It wasn’t razor sharp—it was sharp, but not too sharp," says Jones.
Jones recently shot "Will Be There," for Omega watches out of Katz, Dochtermann and Epstein, New York. Most of the shoot was done on film, using motion control rigs. "We wanted to see every little detail, every little light lighting up," says Jones. "So just as an experiment, we shot some of it on HD. Looking at that footage in post, it was so brilliant with the luminousness and detail. We filmed inside the watch, every little gear, and it was amazing. As a tool for certain things, it can work very well."
Jones, like Nadel, was surprised that advertising clients didn’t take advantage of the Super Bowl, which was broadcast in HD. "It’s only going to take one agency to understand HD and use it," says Jones. "Maybe we’ll see it in an integrated spot, like a car commercial, where the car itself is shot on film, and you cut to a frame of the hubs going by, and that’s done in HD. When it’s done successfully, everyone will follow. I think even as we are talking, somebody’s thinking about it."
Despite their experiments, neither Jones nor Nadel say they are often asked to bid on HD jobs. "I think it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be on the set, shooting film, and someone will say, ‘Hey, that’ll look good on HD.’ And we’ll pop the lens of the film camera and put it on HD," says Jones.
For Nadel, the mix-and-match approach means letting go of a beloved medium: emulsion film. "Being a DP, you count on the dependability of the look of film and of the image you capture," he says. "We like to bask in the texture of film, and everything that our eyes have been trained to see as beautiful. You’re carefully choosing the film stock, the speed of the film, the contrast you want. Part of the resistance to HD is that we’ve fallen in love with the different things film can do. HD is what it is: a digital medium. You capture pure data and you get all these variations in post. All the things you capture in the original with emulsion, you can do in post with HD."
Nadel notes that fewer young directors are choosing to specialize in tabletop, and says that a core group of tabletop directors will have to be at the forefront of change. Alex Fernbach of Hoboken, N.J.-based ARF & Co, agrees. Two of his recent spots, "Flute" and "Flying Chair" for Crate & Barrel via Tucker Tapia, Chicago, stretch the boundaries of what tabletop looks like. (Both were shot on film, though Fernbach’s next project may utilize HD.) "Flute," which showcases the home furnishing store’s stemware, reveals its subject gradually as the long-stemmed glass—and the wine being poured into it—seem to materialize from the bottom up. And in "Flying Chair," Fernbach used a motion control rig and postproduction visual effects to capture the many color and fabric options available for an armchair, which appears to be soaring and tumbling through pure white space. "As all types of commercials are being redefined in this dot-com era, tabletop doesn’t look like traditional tabletop anymore," says Fernbach. "Compare new tabletop work to spots from ten or twenty years ago, and I think you’ll find it more passionate, more evocative, more capricious, and less descriptive of point-of-purchase displays. The execution is more oblique. It’s not just about showing what something looks like. It’s more about showing how it feels or tastes."
