Behind the scenes with a global fitness brand
We Are Syn, a creative agency in Leeds approached us with a video brief for their client Life Fitness, a business supplying commercial fitness equipment to hotels, leisure clubs & gyms around the world. The brief was to create a 2min hero campaign ad titled ‘Symbio’ plus various cutdowns to be showcased online and at trade shows. Syn handled the creative planning and needed support with filming and lighting.
Enter Dead Pixel.
The concept involved an elaborate lighting plan to showcase a futuristic journey of athletes discovering the power of their four new machines for the first time - the general look and feel of the shoot meant we needed a lot of lasers, a lot of haze with complete 360 degree views - ermm where do we put all the crew?
PRE-PRODUCTION
Pre-production began with a full briefing from the Syn creative team discussing the storyboards and sharing the overarching vision of the campaign. Deep diving into the brief meant we could start booking in our camera crew and lighting team along with some super specialist lenses (hyperion borescope anyone?) supplied by our long term collaborator No Drama.
Our production team went over the schedule and built out the shot list aligning to Syn’s vision for the video, hitting key areas including the athletes interacting with the laser’s and product details of the treadmill, elliptical and two bike variations. After some set build complications (timber is EXPENSIVE) we adapted the shot list to suit a more open and abstract set and made sure the storyboards were cohesive and aligned with our shots.
We had a full pre-light and rigging day to iron out any minor kinks before talent arrived on set and to test how long it takes to fill a 20,000sq ft studio with haze. Any guesses?
PRODUCTION
Day 1 began early with a working breakfast - a bacon butty in one hand, shot list in the other. By 9am we were set up and ready to roll on a variety of elaborate camera moves all captured by our in-house DOP Cal Thomson. A key aspect to the concept was movement. Movement of the athletes, movement of the lighting, movement of the gym equipment and of course movement of the camera. The remaining crew including our focus puller had to hide behind large black curtains between takes to make sure they weren’t caught in the background.
We moved onto product details later that afternoon pulling out USP’s and key details highlighting why Life Fitness are one of the best global suppliers to premium gym equipment.
Day 2 was all about lasers.
Lasers can be extremely dangerous (not quite superman level danger) but if they’re looked directly at or shone into a camera sensor they can cause a lot of damage. We brought on a laser specialist who was able to rig the laser over head and dial in any shape, size or frequency needed for the shot. Kieran directed a series of sequences which would be used to open our campaign video where the atheltes would interact with the lasers almost taking power from the light. See a screengrab below for reference:
Day 3 began with a few greenscreen shots allowing for some juicy special fx work to be added in post-production later on down the line. We also laid out a few different textures on the floor, think stones, sand and mud for our athletes to run through. This was all captured in 200 frames per second (8 x slower than real life).
We managed to finish the shoot around 3pm and spent the remaining few hours de-rigging the lighting, packing away the camera kit and backing up the final shots ready for the Syn creative team to begin the edit.
Check out a behind the scenes edit below:
