Amnesty International ‘Child – Shell Hell’

Shot in a single day in Camberwell studios using a Phantom HD Gold camera the commercial consisted of two main elements, the fire and flames which were shot against black at 1000fps, and the performance of the girl shot against greenscreen at 100fps. The concept came from Marc Hawker who also Directed the commercial. Produced by Kate Arton at AMPLtd

The fire was created using a flame gun provided by the machine shop, and Paul the special effects guy had us screeching and then laughing when his hair caught fire in true Michael Jackson fashion. Fortunately he escaped with a bit less hair and no eyebrows, and was able to carry on shooting plumes of beautiful flame upwards at the Phantom camera which was looking down from the scaffolding rig in the roof of the studio. At 1000fps we could only capture 4 seconds of footage (realtime) at each go, but the results were astounding. We had a lot of fun being pyromaniacs, and shooting with this amazing camera, but eventually had to call it a day and relight for the greenscreen performance. We used the Phantom on dolly and tracks for this part, shooting at 100fps with tracking markers and focus points. DazPix supervised the shoot and ensured everything was technically ready for Joe Pavlo to composite together using Nuke. The final result is a challenging piece which will hopefully make people think about what is going on with the oil companies in Africa.

Client: Amnesty International / AMPLtd