Under Armour and Qualtrics Japan
The Situation
One of the biggest asks for all of the Qualtrics customer stories was to make them feel as big and global as possible. While we did filming in Baltimore and Portland for Under Armour we were traveling as well for BMW to Japan and Sweden. Therefore we were asked to film B roll for Under Armour in both those locations. With the Sweden trip we ran out of time and had to cancel the B roll but we were able to set up B roll in Japan.
We hired two actors, a female runner and a male soccer player. The female we filmed in a 150 year old home in Japan that was totally amazing and the soccer player we filmed on a court on the roof outside of Tokyo.
The Gear
Everything was filmed on the Alexa Mini on a Movi Pro. This was done because Under Armour gave us a ton of footage from their archive for us to use in the video and we were trying to match the style they used in the majority of that footage. The movi pro gave a nice smooth look and Alexa Mini with Zeiss Ultra Primes gave great lens flares.
The most difficult part for me on this shoot was the transition from filming BMW to filming Under Armour. The three days before with BMW the style was static shots with all actions entering and exiting the frame. It was on sticks basically the entire time. Switching over to a fluid moving with the action type filmmaking took some mental exercises to get back into the flow of it. It was a little odd how difficult it was. But after the first two set ups I was back in the flow.
The Runner
The location by far the best part of this whole shoot. It made it so much easier to find great shots when you have a fantastic location. The shots were fairly simple but really fun. The other difficult part was trying to work with the talent because she didn’t speak any English and so everything had to go through the translator. This made the shoot take a little longer than usually so something to take into account the next time we film in a foreign country.
My favorite shot was a transition through the paper door down a hallway tracking with the girl. For the lighting set up we used 2 M18s shooting through the windows and used the paper doors as diffusion. The M18 shooting through the door she opens we used 1/4 grid 6x6 to soften it up slightly. Inside was a skypanel s60 shooting up into a 2x4 bounce board into the ceiling than used some flags to help control spill. We than hazed up the room to give nice atmosphere and shafts of lights through the window.
After the house we filmed the Soccer player on the roof but we will get to that in a minute after the soccer player we filmed the rest of the Runner and because we were running out of light we had to move really fast. I was on a 24mm the entire time and we just ran with her through a few different streets and down an alley. All in all it worked out really nicely.
The Soccer Player
For the second time in Japan we had to cram as much of the crew and equipment into an elevator to get to the roof of a building. We only had one hour on the roof and the player of course wasn’t that great at soccer so it took a lot of takes. We were on a 24mm and 50mm the whole time. We shot everything wide than everything close. Because we only had an hour we used a bounce board for fill and flag for negative fill when needed and I rolled the whole time.
This wasn’t nearly as exciting as the runner it was a little bit of a let down because of some of the issues with the player not performing as well as we were hoping. We got the shots it just wasn’t super exciting.
The two vignettes both runner and soccer player we had them do the Qualtrics survey to help fill in the gaps in the story that we had so the shoot was a good success.