“It must be pretty nice driving around the countryside for a few days” This is what my client said to me whilst location hunting in Wales recently and of course it is, particularly in the Spring when everything is so lush.
I love Wales, it has such an incredible richness and diversity of landscapes, all of which are man made of course, from the obvious scarred regions of mines and reservoirs that lubricate the midlands and Liverpool to the vastness of countryside which has been nurtured over centuries of farming, landscapes that Capability Brown and Humphry Repton emulated in the great estates, but these natural landscapes are ones that we can all enjoy and it takes little opportunity for me to return to.
The client was Lotus and I was searching for roads on which to exhibit the Exige S. However, the problem I had was an unbelievably small budget. Really, I should have been shooting at their own test track, but the brand got the better of me. I grew up with the Roger Moore era of Bond, hence Lotus and incredibly, was lucky enough to have a trip round the Hethel circuit in the “Spy Who Loved Me” Esprit when I was a kid, so I was particularly keen to do the best we could on this job. Also, we know all Lotus cars go well round a track, they're renowned for their engineering and it's what the brand was built upon by Colin Chapman. I personally found this out when laying out the Top Gear circuit at Dunsfold. Whatever configuration of bends I hatched out with bollards, the Elise, driven by Lotus test driver Gavan Kershaw, effortlessly drove around them and barely slid. These cars are truly stickier than a sticky thing. I soon found out that Gavan was also the Autocar powerslide champion, so I wasn't really helping myself in finding out just where our “star” drivers may come off and which bits of runway architecture we had to remove. I eventually drove the bends myself and the drama revealed itself.
After scouring roads in North and South Wales I eventually plummeted for the Breacon Beacons, as it was marginally quicker to reach and offered several options for both tracking and dynamic up and bys in close proximity. The scenery there is quite breathtaking.
Tracking is pretty fundamental in filming cars, so due to our tight budget my DoP (Paul O'Callaghan) recommended using a Steadicam which I hadn't used before in this set-up – the results were remarkable. Sadly due to rain though, we only had a short test session with it on our travel day, but unbelievably we managed to use it with a 135mm lens. Whilst Paul struggled a little to hold frame on this lens, the Steadicam did its' job and thankfully we did capture a few shots from this session before we were rained out and the shots saved the sequence.
I'm now hoping to shoot a Drama short on the back of this.
Lotus Exige S - Cinema commercial
Producer/Director: Chris Hook
DoP: Paul O'Callaghan
2nd Camera and Stills: Oli Tennent
Precision Driver: Giles Mallard
Editor: Joe Orr