Saturday, October 24, 2009

"Fill out your Gaa-dammm census form!" Ah... racial!

A couple weeks ago, we had the pleasure to shoot a spot for the upcoming 2010 US Census, focussed specifically towards an African-American target audience. It was an ambitious 2 day cram-fest of a shoot, with 3 camera units, over 50 different set-ups, and a crowd of about 500 extras on a downtown Manhattan street during a work week. The concept was about coming together as a community, and with one collective voice being able to influence positive change in education, transportation and healthcare. A gigantic crowd collects on the street, but their voices aren't heard until one guy (that looks uncannily like the young version of Denzel from Glory but without the severe back scarring), makes his way down from his apartment and joins in... and one by one, we begin to hear the crowd's unified chant, giving it real power.

We were lucky enough to shoot with the cinematographer of 90% of Aronofsky's films, and the Iron Man movies, Matthew Libatique... and the music composer is the amazing Tyler Bates, from 300 and Watchmen fame. Not a bad team really. And, we beat out some big name directors for the spot too, which is always a plus... I won't say who, cause this blog may come up when he late-night googles his name, but put it this way - we were 13 when he directed his most famous early 90's grunge music video. Weird... for him.

So naturally we embraced the scope of the project, shot the absolute cripe out of it from more angles than Terrance Malick could think up, and came up with a 90 second extended version that's really beautiful and emotive. Only bummer is that it's not available to show anybody until early next year... sooooo, I guess there's basically no reason for us to be posting this right noooow... is... there? How do you delete these things again?

Jon [Josh].