Towards the end of last year I was asked to work on an unusual assignment, one that really did end the year with a bang! My good friend Rohan Rimmer put Amie Mills at Blacksand in touch with me. The team at Blacksand had come up with a great transmedia campaign for the TV show Shortland Street while it was off air over the holiday season.
The final show had climaxed with an explosion and left viewers with the classic cliffhanger, wondering who had survived and who hadn't. They had worked out 34 days of clues to keep fans on tenterhooks! Some were video clips others audio clips and where I came in was to produce still images to throw in the mix.
The first set of images needed as clues had to look as though they were shot at the location of the explosion the following morning by a passer by. Of course the props had to look as though they had been through the explosion... enter the trusty BBQ! It was more than a little sketchy at times, but I managed to grill everything from Jandals to fence posts, all very well done! God knows what my neighbours thought with all the toxic smoke that was blowing over the fence!
Next stop was to find a location that would match in with the reference footage I had been given and after a couple of false starts I found the perfect spot at Stillwater north of Auckland. It was remote enough for me to put up crime scene tape (you wouldn't believe how hard that was to get hold of) without any inquisitive passers by getting involved. I had a field day shooting melted Jandals, Santa hats, tinsel wrapped fence posts and gas cylinders all strewn around the place.
The next shots were of a variety of actual props from the show, supplied to us by South Pacific Pictures. The key here was to find abstract, interesting angles and lighting that didn't give the game away too easily! We had everything from beautiful Maori feather cloaks to bomb wiring to play with, giving us plenty of scope to create interesting images. Amie also put together a very convincing detectives desk which with some clandestine lighting looked absolutely great. She also created a large evidence board which we shot to be used as a huge billboard outside the TVNZ building.
My final contribution to the project was to retouch in some palls of smoke on some of my location shots and fire damage to a gas bottle laying in the grass... even I wasn't silly enough to throw that one on the BBQ!
