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www.postmagazine.com 9 POST MARCH 2015 IKA COLLECTIVE PRODUCES :60 POV IMAGE SPOT FOR DISCOVERY LIFE CHANNEL LAUNCH CAMPAIGN NEW YORK — How do you capture the arc of a life in 60 seconds? That was the challenge direc- tor Ian Karr and creative boutique IKA Collective (www.ikacollective.com) were asked to tackle for the debut of Discovery Life Channel. The :60 image spot, Love Every Step, captures the life story of a young woman from childhood to the birth of her own daughter. Using an immersive POV style, the campaign pushes the limits of technology, while blending in emotion. "So many people are moved by this spot. I directed it and it still chokes me up," says Karr. "For this spot to resonate, it couldn't just look like real life, it needed to feel like real life. Only we had to condense that lifetime into two days using actors, lights, wearable cameras and visual effects. That required an approach that looks deceptively simple, but in reality was incredibly complex and nuanced." Shot on location in Newark, NJ, and at New York-based production space Gary's Loft, Love Every Step opens with a POV shot of a baby in her crib while her excited parents coo over her. We travel through a series of moments that make up a young woman's life until the spot ends with the wom- an and her husband watching their daughter's first steps. According to Karr, viewers never actually see the lead actress, so it was vital that she "deliver especially strong vocal and physical performances to connect with the audience — all while controlling the camera." For Karr and his DP Bill Winters, getting the right tone for the POV concept meant experimenting in pre-production with an array of cameras, rigs and lenses. The one that worked best was the popular GoPro consumer camera, albeit tricked out in a way that few extreme sports enthusiasts might ever do. GoPros with modified lenses on a special headband rig recorded the action to a Sound Devices Pix 240 recorder at 48fps. Recording ProRes at twice the intended frame rate ensured maximum quality, while a wireless unit was connect- ed to the recorder so Karr and Winters could see the camera moment and direct the action. "GoPro was the best solution because of its small size and light weight," Winters says. "Our actress needed to wear the camera on her head for many hours over the course of two days and anything larger would have impeded her movement and performance. We wanted her to be able to move as freely as possible and not limit her movements with a heavier camera and rig." He adds, "We also liked the look of the GoPro, which had a more authentic feel to it. With higher-end cameras, the footage felt too polished and pro- duced. The GoPro felt more real, and the combination of the modified lenses and the higher frame rates added to the hyper-real feeling." Making sure that the "real life" feeling stayed throughout the post process, Karr personally edited the spot and supervised a detailed color grading session with Roman Hankewycz at post house Harbor Picture Company in New York. According to Karr, "In Adobe Premiere, the 48fps footage was dropped into a 24 frame timeline without interpreting it as overcranked. The effect looked slightly more hyper-real than regular 24p footage, and had the added benefit of doubling the amount of information in each frame." Once in post, Karr offlined the edit in Adobe Premiere CC. "I've been tran- sitioning from Final Cut for a while and this was the first job completely fin- ished in Premiere. I was really happy with the responsiveness and impressed with the round-trip workflows through DaVinci and ProTools. One interesting tool used in the post process was Occipital Software's 360Panorama. For [a VFX car crash] to feel authentic, the CGI vehicle needed to reflect light as it naturally would if it were a practical element in the scene. At the shoot, we used the 360 app on an iPhone to take a global panoramic photo, which was used in Cinema 4D for reflection mapping." BITS & PIECES Stormy Weather on Arri S35 – Red 5K – HD StormStock® The world's premier storm footage library. (817) 276-9500 www.stormstock.com IKA employed a GoPro camera and Adobe Premiere for this :60 spot.