American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 99

by Stephanie Argy
Saab

the horizon. The

Collage
by Stephanie Argy
After signing on to make a film
that would introduce the new Saab 9-7X
SUV at the New York Auto Show, direc¬
tor Yann Secouet faced a

major hurdle, of course,
turning the concept into reality.
Trageser relates, "The biggest part of the
job was figuring out the array. How does
it move? Does it crane, does it pan, does
it tilt?" He began exchanging e-mails
was

challenge. At

the time, the car was still a prototype
that lacked a working engine, which

presented an obvious problem in terms
shooting footage of the vehicle in

of

action. Moreover, because the vehicle

being kept tightly under wraps at
the time, it would be impossible to take
it to some of the locations that the direc¬

with Secouet, who was still in London,
and they determined that to convey the
POV idea, the motion of the array should
be able to simulate the movements of

Trageser

was

imagined shooting, such
town Los Angeles.
tor

as

down¬

The solution Secouet devised
was to
on

combine

images of the

car

shot

stage with a unique collage of barely

overlapping images, which were tiled
together to form a widescreen image
representing the POV of a driver moving
quickly down a road. Because the land¬
scapes Secouet envisioned were all in
the American West, the London-based

director wanted

a Los Angeles cine¬
matographer, and his producer
suggested Eric Trageser. "I was sent the
treatment that Yann used to pitch the

idea to Saab, and it was brilliant,"

A multi-camera array was used to create unique
POV shots for a Saab spot.

86

September 2004

remembers Trageser. "Yann's back¬
ground is in effects supervising and post,
and he said his main source of inspira¬
tion for this spot was the photo collages
of David Hockney."
By the time Trageser was brought
onto the project, Secouet already had
settled on making an array of cameras
two rows tall, with four images
produced from each row. When 4x3
images were tiled together this way, the
overall aspect ratio was 2.66:1, a frame
that proved ideal for images showing

a

driver's head, which meant it should be
able to turn left, turn right and tilt.
soon

realized that

a

great prototype for what he needed to do

already existed: the shiny board. Like the
he visualized, a shiny board is a
rectangle that can pan and tilt. Moreover,
its center of gravity is relatively low,
which means that as long as one can
access that center of gravity, it takes
array

little effort to

move

the board, however

heavy it might be.
The next question was how the
rig would be mobilized. Secouet had
determined that he wanted to shoot at

Tejon Ranch, Vasquez Rocks, Hansen
Dam and the Amboy salt flats and in
downtown Los Angeles, so whatever
vehicle the array rode on had to be rela¬
tively rugged - and strong enough to
accommodate a large, heavy rig.
Finally, the cinematographer had
to decide what types of cameras to
mount on the rig. He considered using
24p MiniDV Panasonic DVX100s, but
decided against them because they
lacked sophisticated paint-control capa¬
bilities. Moreover, the filmmakers had to
be able to control all

eight cameras
remotely because their color, focus, zoom
and iris controls would have to be oper¬
ated from a video-engineering station
some

distance from the array.
The cameras' size was also

an

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Phot s
American Cinematographer - September 2004

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