Motorola ‘Bond’ with The Mill

Award winning Director Fredrik Bond has set up his own production shop, Sonny London. ‘Hakko’ is Bond’s first collaboration with Motorola and was shot over four days in Prague for advertising agency Ogilvy Beijing.

The spot opens with a rooftop shot set against a brooding skyline before moving to the interior of an apartment where we see a young guy wrapped in a restricting mass of black cables. His outstretched hand fights against the cables to grasp at the new ROKR phone. As his fingers reach the phone, the cables fly away one by one, vanishing through cracks in the wall and gaps in the floorboards, leaving the guy free to enjoy the wireless music experience offered by Motorola latest mobile.

‘I loved the script,’ Bond reveals, ‘and Motorola seemed to think I was right for it.’ The brief was a fairly open one ?‚àö√ë‚àö¬® as Bond explains, ‘Make a kid the victim of black cables in his flat and have the magic of the phone help him get rid of them.’ There definitely something magical, even slightly Harry Potter-esque, about the spot; not least the choice of a lead who looks a bit like Daniel Radcliffe.

According to Bond: ‘We shot most scenes with cables and had The Mill recreate the physically impossible movements like the wide shot where the cables are flying round the room. We had a very clear idea of what we wanted as we had shot most of it but it needed movement enhancement.’

The four-day shoot that was packed with pleasant surprises. A full-sized Parisian apartment set built on a raised platform, fifteen kilometers of wires (with a Czech crew of professional wire wranglers), a professional acrobat, a three-ton camera rig for cinematic movements, an assortment of birds and cats, a 1/25th scale model of Montmartre in the early 1900s – just to name a few. And manning the camera was Ben Seresin, fresh off the production of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 3’.

Flame artist Ben Turner commented:”some of the cables were shot in camera, which is always a good reference, but as the 3D guys started to get into their stride, it was becoming clear that we felt we could achieve a more dynamic movement of the cables in 3D. The film needed to end on a ‘bright note’, and the more we roughed out the sky from beginning to end, the more we were able to to push a look that felt like a new dawn breaking”.

Mill VFX Supersivor Hitesh Patel attended the shoot to work closely with the Director and DOP to optimise each shot for flawless merging of CG work later.