Front line emergency services. Limited time for production. Anamorphic lenses.
Anamorphic lenses produce beautiful, cinematic images. Light diffuses differently. Shafts of light take on character. The lenses are heavy and difficult to focus, and moreso on moving shots and with a steadicam.
We won a national procurement exercise to deliver a visceral, beautiful, tense look at a day in the life of a fire officer for GMFRS. The shoot would be flexible around front line services and their attendance, and require hazardous situations to be filmed and entered by crew. Each shot required planning and careful thought. We wanted to use anamorphic lenses to give more depth to scenes, and to assist with a cinemascope delivery format for a custom projection theatre at the GMFRS training site in Bury.
We shot a total of 7 days, over a period of 4 months whilst we were on call for suitable locations and available crew. Post production took place in 4K 25p and we custom graded the film for its projection environment and sound mixed for 5.1.
The client was overwhelmed, and very, very happy. The full length edit is displayed on site at over 4K resolution with 3 projectors in sync. A shorter “flashback’ edit is shown here.