SURF'S UP AT SONNY

Sonny director Guy Manwaring heads to South Africa in his latest shoot for Surf, bringing puppets to life for the big screen in collaboration with the crative team behind the sensational stage show War Horse.

1st week of December, 2008 (12 weeks to the shoot)

I receive follow up script to Surf 'Duvet', which we shot last year. (Originally, the script was structured a little differently and was actually called "Sheet Maze".) It opens on a girl hanging out her washing and she goes behind the linen to discover a maze of sheets.

The next day, 2008

I have a meeting at BBH with Kim and Mareka and I pitch the idea of having the girl enter the sheet world, but to keep the camera outside the sheets - to tell the story using only shadows. I knew that this was quite a leap from the original concept but they respond really well to the idea and allow me to really develop this route.

18th January (5 weeks to the shoot)

We are in Cape Town shooting the Snickers helicopter ad with Mr.T and have started prepping things for Surf. I have my first meeting with the Shadow Puppeteer, Janni Younge, who we will be collaborating with.

We do a small test and what is really interesting is that she uses a tiny little bulb to create the shadows. The smaller the filament the sharper the shadows. It means that the shadows stay sharp no matter how close the cut outs are to the bulb. Later this turns out to be our biggest problem to recreate at scale.

End of January. (3 weeks to the shoot)

I return to London and start working out the structure of the story and doing my boards. Client is beginning to ask for more and more examples of how it will look, but as this hasn't really been done before on this scale it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

I decide to send my boards to an old school friend of mine. She's an artist living in Scotland and her painting style is quite dreamlike and feminine. I ask her to redraw my boards in her style, hoping that this will work as a better visual reference for the client.

The result is perfect and has a huge influence on the way we ended up designing the look of the dream world.

16th February. (7 days to the shoot)

Back in Cape Town and this is the day of our first lighting test with the DOP, Bruno Delbonnel.

I explain to Bruno about the small filament principle that I learnt from our first test, and he seems pretty confident.

We set up a huge silk sheet in the studio and one light, and this is when we realise that the technique wasn't going to be as simple as we had first thought. We get a sharp shadow when the object or person is close to the sheet, but as soon as they walk towards the light to increase the size of the shadow - they become a blur.

Fuck.

And the beginning of a week of scratching heads

17th - 18th February (5 days to the shoot)

Bruno spends his evenings researching online and asking other DOP mates if they can think of a solution. Clint Eastwood is in town prepping a movie and Bruno asks his DOP for advice - the guy has no idea. John Mathieson is also staying at the Mount Nelson - he too is stumped.

We try other tests with projectors, which actually work really well. In fact the best result we have is with a university data projector. But when we see the rushes the next day there is a flicker that is unavoidable.

Back to the drawing board.

19th February (4 days to the shoot)

We decide that a good safety option would be to use an old school projector, but it would have to be a powerful one to be able to get an exposure. Turns out that they don't exist any more in Cape Town, so Alice (my producer) contacts hire places in London. She tracks one down and it happens to be just around the corner from her house.

Quick call to an unemployed Kiwi who's sleeping on her floor and the projector is travelling economy to Cape Town in under two hours.

Sods Law dictates that as soon as you spend money on one solution, an easier and cheaper one will pop up closer to hand… it does.

20th February (3 days to shoot)

Running out of time we do a late night, pizza fuelled test session at the camera hire place. Same again, we hang up a sheet, put the camera on one side and then arrange a long line of lights on the other side. It is like a casting session for filaments.

6 slices of pepperoni into the session we strike big-scale shadow puppetry gold, and it is beautiful.


21st February

Alice's Kiwi mate lands with the now totally useless old school projector.

We pre-light and start set building at the studio. A few days before I have requested that we start building as many props as possible to scale, in case we don't find a light that works with the smaller props.

We are right on the edge of getting an exposure but as more and more of our cut outs are assembled it becomes clear that this is going to work.

Sigh of relief.

23rd February.

The studio shoot day.

It is a strange looking set to shoot on because it is divided down the middle with a giant sheet the size of a cinema screen, with each side totally contrasting one another.

On one side there is the camera (which remains mostly static throughout, except for a couple of tracking shots), myself and the agency - pretty uncluttered. Whereas on the other side of the sheet it looks like total chaos, with cut-outs all over the place hanging from wires and being propped up with stands.

The hardest thing about directing the shadow puppetry is communicating with people who are on the other side of a sheet. This becomes a lot easier once I borrow the focus puller's laser torch, which becomes an invaluable tool to use as a pointer on the screen, as it can be seen by people on both sides.

25th-26th February

We shoot the exterior footage for the beginning and end of the ad at magic hour over these two days.
The sun obviously has to be low enough for us to get the shadows on the sheets and to create the 'Twilight' look that we need.

In hindsight I think that we were pretty lucky with the weather on these final days. Anyone who has shot in Cape Town probably knows how windy it can get, which would have probably made shooting impossible considering we had basically constructed a 70ft sail by sewing sheets together.

9th September

Looking back, it was a really rewarding process to pitch on something with a technique that you had never used before. But totally convinced that it was achievable. Then to go through the whole spectrum of emotions as you try to figure out how to make it possible. As we all know, the harder route is often ultimately the more interesting one, and I am glad that the agency and the client had the confidence on this project to allow us to be totally experimental.