San Francisco-based director and writer Jason Zada shot a five-episode Web series and three 30-second broadcast spots for Adidas with AJ-HPX3000 native 1080p P2 HD and AJ-HPX500 2/3in shoulder-mount P2 HD camcorders.
The campaign features five Adidas-sponsored MLS teams and depicts “a day in the life of soccer in America” as seen through the eyes of several professionals who spend time with young players on and off the playing fields of their home cities.
For the Dream MLS campaign, San Francisco digital marketing agency EVB hired Zada and San Francisco-based Bad Company to create content on a limited budget while traveling to eight cities in 13 days. Zada served as director and head creative, Danny Toback was director of photography and Bad Company’s Raub Shapiro was producer.
The crew started with the HPX500 to take advantage of its various frame rates and extended shooting time, Toback said. By using four 32G P2 cards while shooting at 24pn/720p, the crew could shoot for five hours without reloading.
Once the first episode’s principal photography was completed, the director and DP reassessed their needs and determined that they only needed to shoot at 24fps. At that point, they opted for the image quality of the HPX3000.
“In each location, we would take one-camera package and shoot pieces of the city itself — not the regular postcard shots of well-known icons but identifiable portraits of the city and the street soccer community,” Toback said. “We would then repeat the two-camera shoot with a different athlete, different kids and different scenarios.”
In each city, the ability to download the footage quickly was invaluable, he said. Using the software download for the AVC-Intra codec, the production crew could import the files to multiple hard disks and express ship each episode’s footage back to EVB in San Francisco.
The cameras were rented from Birns & Sawyer, in Hollywood, CA. The Dream MLS spots and Web series were edited on Final Cut Studio 2.
For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/broadcast.
