Ok we’re going to boast here. Even gloat a bit. In fact we’re so proud we’re going to spin this over two posts. Take a look at what our YDA award winning students and winners of our special prize in 2005 have just created for Batelco in Bahrain. We asked Alex & Steffen to talk us through their evolvement from their 2005 nutty Racing Beats to this slick dynamic film called Infinity.

Our diploma piece “Racing Beats” was supposed to be our last work as directors as we had both studied “visual effects” at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg but had both loved directing small films during our studies. We wanted to direct one more live-action short before we would start working in the post-production industry FOR other directors.
We booked cheap flights around Germany and took hundreds of photos of airports, special vehicles and aircraft during the bus-transfers to and from the plane. These photos were necessary to create the digital airport, airplanes and the whole environment which is of course very hard to shoot for real especially on a student budget.

After a one-day green screen shoot with the actors and after five weeks of working around the clock we finished this “last film” as directors. We entered it to several awards because that’s what you do with your final student work – but we never really expected anything, and definitely nothing like the awareness of the Young Director´s Award.
Winning the YDA in 2005 with “Racing Beats” was basically the starting point of us directing commercials. We got so much international attention within the split of a second that it was absolutely overwhelming. All of a sudden everyone told us that we were “commercial directors” but in fact we did not know anything about the ad world – but we soon would.
Roughly a month and a half after the YDA we found ourselves in Vancouver shooting a commercial for the WWF with Spyfilms. We had to deal with the agency, the client, and the fast timing. We did not even know what a PPM was! But we learned pretty quickly. Now we love PPMs as they are big fun most of the time!

Afterwards we shot two action-packed campaigns for Snickers Russia which were pretty successful. Snickers “Rugby” and “Tag” were another intense lift for us as directors and our postproduction piece “Unexpected”. Both were featured in Shots which created far more international interest in our work. From that point on we shot commercials all over the world. We always tried to push the creative a bit further by being deeply involved in the story, writing it to our own expectations and to push the boundaries of postproduction.

snickers tag
As we handle the whole projects from the beginning to the end we learned to use this as an advantage on set. Whenever we encounter a problem we can always decide straight away whether we want to fix that in post or not. As we already have the visual effects in our minds on set it is easier for us to guide the agency and the client through our shoot, especially complex shots that involve a lot of visual effects.

Of course you always try new things and develop more skills that you’d not have thought possible. We created a huge sandstorm for one of our commercials that we shot in the middle of the dunes of Namibia and created a full digital city and exploding characters for our latest Alfa Romeo “MiTo” ad. We shot a large campaign in Turkey consisting of 10 spots and in the end the agency was so happy they gave us more or less a free run on two spots where we created an action-packed soccer game kids vs robots and a playful film with a robot nanny as a tragic character.

Shortly before last Christmas, City Films in Beirut contacted us about shooting a commercial for the Bahrain Telecom. First we weren’t so keen about the script, but the agency kept coming back to us and they were happy to get our input on the visual effects and characters in the story, so we started working on it eagerly. Dozens of emails were sent back and forth between us and the creatives until we ended up with a story and visuals which we really liked. But nothing happened for weeks, almost months. We were quite sure the project had been cancelled until we got a call from City Films that it was a “go”.
We decided to shoot in Toronto with Spyfilms co-operating. We wanted to create a world that everybody would enjoy living in, where dreams can come true. The agency trusted us a lot as they knew our other work and so we had the freedom to fool around especially in post.
Originally the spot was supposed to be two minutes but we decided to go to 3:20 to tell the story in a better way. Of course there are shots in the film which would be very hard or expensive to shoot, so we drove around Toronto with digital SLRs and took hundreds of photos of possible perspectives and interesting shots… the same way as we did for “Racing Beats”. And most of the skater, rollercoaster and glider scenes are based on these photos. We still love working like this!

Next week Alex & Steffen show us how they made Infinity. If you’ve got any questions you’d like to ask them let us know!