Behind The Scenes:

Final Video:

Monte Isom on Colin Kane’s 90 second stop motion promo:

When comedian Colin Kane said he wanted to do a promo video Moose Herd Creatives Jim Kamoosi and Laura Wing-Kamoosi stepped up with an idea to create a rolling environment that features Kane walking through a night in his life. The technique that was chosen was an editing heavy stop motion animation. I used the Nikon d3 as it is a full frame chip but still has an 11 fps motor drive. I mounted it in stereo with a Canon 5d markII that was filming video in case the technique we were attempting didn’t work out. Due to the fantastic editing of Jim Kamoosi we didn’t use a single second of video footage in the final piece. 14,000 stills later we have a 90 second spot.

To achieve consistent lighting for Colin’s walk through the frames we had an assistant tracking the subject for each dolly shot at a fixed distance with a Litepanel 1×1 bi color. On camera right we used a Lowel DP unfiltered to match the tungsten light of the existing street lights. A few shots were supplemented with a Litepanel micro to open up the shadows a bit. The changing color balance of each location adds to the effect of the changing backgrounds. Hope it is as fun to watch as it was to make.

Check out Colin’s website: http://www.colinkane.com and hit him up on http://twitter.com/#/colinkane

Here is a recap on this shoot from Monte himself:

“The Ea Sports gig was one of the most fun of my career. As an 8 year old you see a pale of water and say to someone nearby ,”I’m going to splash you”. But you don’t otherwise your are jerk kid. Here, the brilliant art director on the project, Alvaro Sotomayor of W+K Amsterdam, approached me with and idea to splash 400 liters of paint on soccer fans to illustrate the tag line “Make the world wear your colors”. This instantly brought out the 8 year old boy in me!

Finding the consistency took some time. With the help of my studio manager, Alanda Spence, friends and fellow photographer Josh Maread, we did a test shoot and were able to find the right viscosity. The final formula was 1 part non toxic acrylic paint to 3 parts water. As you saw in your wake boarding video (which is badass by the way) it is a lot of trial and error on pale/bucket/cup size and distance of throws. With that I watched a couple episodes of Dexter to prep the set and away we went.

In order to keep our talent “clean” we had 5 main talent being splashed for each country of fans. So we would bring 1 of them up and splash them 5 or 6 times then send them to ditch wardrobe, shower, get new identical wardrobe and then head to hair/makeup. By the time we finished the 5th talent the first was ready to go again. We cycled through all five subjects 5 times each.

I shot with the Hasselblad 503cxi with a 150mm lens. Our depth of field was f16 so the background talent did not go soft. All strobes are Profoto 7a which did a good job of stopping action. I’ve been using the Pro 8′s recently as they have a much faster recycle time and shorter flash duration. I have a great hockey shoot I just did for Molson that illustrates this really well and I’ll have a video ready for release in April for it. A sneak peek is attached below.

We also shot the red one camera at 120 frames per second at 720p for out slow mo shots. Rommel Genciana was the DP on the Red camera. For video I mimicked my strobe lighting with arri 2k and 5k tungsten hotlights gelled for day light balance.

In the end the entire cast, crew and clients of 76 had a ball. After all, isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing?”