Marina Square Your Christmas Wonderland
Shooting from A Point-Of-View for this years Christmas Video with Marina Square Singapore
We dive into the eyes of young Anna who is exploring Marina Square Singapore Aquatic Christmas Wonderland with her family. An interesting Point-Of-View Video by our Director, Aloysius Ong and Director of Photography, Darren Choy.
PRE-PRODUCTION [STORYBOARD]
PRODUCTION
“Shooting a POV looks easy but it is not especially from a Kid’s POV”- Darren Choy
The idea of shooting a POV is to let them camera do what a child would do. Indeed natural movements and shakes are important. But the real focus here is to think like how would a child react in the wonderland at MSQ Singapore.
The beauty of shooting a POV allows us to tell a story of how it was like holding our parents hand when we are younger. The direction was to explore Marina Square Singapore’s Aquatic Christmas Wonderland and it was important to use such scenes of hand holding to express the feeling of being brought and guided into this magical space.
LIGHTING
Lighting a POV scene is highly dependent on the surroundings. The mall’s light were a mixture of hot and cold elements, there were much natural lights from the atrium of MSQ Singapore and we found ourselves relying on the Aputure 600D Pro, Aputure 300DII and Aputure 60x most of the times.
We used the spotlight mount on the Aputure 600D to spot focus and light signifiant areas and parts of where the talents are walking on as a source of fill. And the Aputure 300DII to give a secondary fill with an attachment of Aputure’s Light Dome II. The Aputure 60x were mainly use to fill in the talents hair and face, we had an ease using the super compact and versatile light.
Apart from the Aputure 600D Pro that has to be powered by a wall plug for it’s full light emittance power , we found the Aputure 60x to be one of the best inventions made by Aputure. It is easily stationed for any close-up shots during the shoot and what is even more amazing is that the device is powered by L batteries at 8800mah which makes carrying the lights around the mall, easy.
DIRECTOR’S TREATMENT
“POV is a fun and interesting way to shoot a social commercial video. When planning for a POV shoot as an adult you dive back into a child’s mind and realise the genuine forgotten moments as a child .”
- Director, Aloysius.
The treatment of a POV had to be crafted carefully in a perspective of a Nine-Year Old Girl. The attention span and movement of such a girl’s age has to be natural moving. This helps us create the nostalgic memory to viewers and remind them on how was it like to be that child that might had once enjoyed themselves in an outing with their parents at a mall when they were young.
We constantly challenged ourselves as we wanted to strike a balance between the envisioned and realistic measures taken to shoot the scenes. We spent most of the time trying to rig the camera to achieve our desired look and feel of a POV.
Surprisingly the talent in the video was not a trained actress, such coordination does required someone of a trained caliber. We were awe bu the fact that the two days shoot was manageable in terms of stamina, focus and energy given by the talent.
FINAL VIDEO
The post production work was really all about stitching and colour grading with a cinematic touch. It is very straightforward and we shall dive into the output which is a 88 seconds long video as shown below.