Director Brandon Dickerson Gets Small for Microsoft

If making a Web spot is a good excuse to cut corners in production, nobody told commercial director Brandon Dickerson. When he stepped forward to direct a new :25 spot for Microsoft designed to stream in a tiny bit of real estate inside a Web page, he approached it more or less the way he’d approach any high-end commercial – scouting a great location, shooting 35mm, and doing speed ramps in camera instead of in post for a classier look.

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“It was so wild to be shooting 35mm,” Dickerson told Film & Video. “It looked just like the previous commercial I shot – same 35mm, same crew, same everything. But we knew this one was for the Web. It was really an eye-opener, for me, that this was no longer the stepchild of marketing.”

The concept for the spot, part of a Microsoft campaign asking if your business is “people-ready,” used the idea of a Steadicam zipping around at super-high speeds inside a corporate headquarters to illustrate the connections between different people in different departments of a company. Dickerson shot at the Nikken North America World Headquarters in Irvine, California, which offered a cross between corporate hallways and wide-open spaces that gave him maximum flexibility. “The repetition of the architecture made editing it so much easier,” Dickerson says. “We’d go in one door, and that was a similar door to what I’d find on the second floor way over by the IT department. So I was able to weave in and out of the location because the architecture was so consistent.

The biggest concern in pre-production, Dickerson says, was the effect of heavy compression on the fast-moving tracking shots, Dickerson. “They gave me several clips of Run Lola Run to show me what kind of compression we were using,” he says. “I was disappointed, and glad to hear that they would continue to work on the technology. It was so compressed that some of the zip moves didn’t work – the big concern was that if you moved too fast and it was compressed the camera move would appear to be a cut – but they continued to work and made that better.”

Eventually, Dickerson decided that the quick tracking shot forward would read as long as it lasted long enough to give the viewer a clear sense of the motion. “Something in the one-and-a-half to three-second mode played well. I actually designed the moves so the first move was longer. Once the viewer understood the connectivity of it there was no need to spend so much time on the move.”

So the spot starts off with an exterior tracking shot running at 40 frames a second, for a slight slo-mo effect at 30 fps playback. The camera ramps down to as low as 3 fps for a forward zoom, then comes back up to 40 as it lingers on the faces of the actors who represent different faces of the company. The final spot consists of four separate shots edited together to appear seamless.

It would have been a fairly easy effect to put together in post, but instead the production decided to capture all the speed changes in camera, doing ramps and shutter adjustment on the fly to get a more organic look. It was a balancing act on set as Dickerson and his crew tried to figure out where the post house, FilmCore, might be in need of a few extra frames to tweak one of the speed changes, and tried to time the ramps accordingly. “If you gave too few frames, the post guys had nowhere to go with the footage,” Dickerson explains. “If we overdid it, it was unusable footage. If we didn’t ramp properly, we’d blaze past our people too quickly.”

Dickerson readily admits that decision could have been disastrous if the camera crew missed some of its cues. “What I’d like you to print is, ‘Wow, that’s the ballsiest thing I’ve ever heard of! With Microsoft! That guy’s crazy!'” Dickerson says. “But it’s a little too punk-rock to say that. The truth is, we shot with a back-up safety. That’s how I presented it to them, because no one would take that risk. It’s not worth anyone’s livelihood. So I said, ‘I’ll shoot it very safe, 60 frames, and FilmCore can manipulate it any way they want. But we’re also going to try and be very bold and do it in camera.’

“60 frames gave them ultimate control, because they had twice as many frames as they really needed, so they could completely manipulate it. In the end, we ended up going with the in-camera footage, which is great, because the shutter gives you a distinct look which is more organic and interesting. The intent was to put a blur in, but in the end they even removed the blur.”

Dickerson got himself into a Web frame of mind partly by relying on smaller monitors. During much of the shoot, he walked down the hallways with his Steadicam operator during photography to get a sense of the image on the video display. “The display was green and small and not super-clear,” he recalls. “And I was thinking, this is probably one of the better ways I could be looking at this. Such a variety of people are going to be watching this all over the world. So I needed to make sure that it was all about the emotion. What they’re saying is, ‘Are you people-ready?’ So it has to be about the faces, and the performance in those close-up shots. I probably went in more intimate than I would for something that was going to air on television, because we had to make sure the elements would play well on a smaller screen. But the quality, and the depth of field, was all the same. I think this 'Web' thing is here to stay.”