This was a strange one for me that I have still not got my head around I think the title is very apt. We met David Southwood, he reminded me of David Brent from the office. The company work lots on adverts this is their main thing. They do a lot with Sainsburys and vision express. The production is as follows The client comes in with the Ideas. Then they create a treatment. The shoot the advert for the method. This is often guided by the pre Production team. Then it goes to the creative team. They also like molinare recorded everything at 2k instead of the 625 lines you get on tv. They use the Flame system in their studios these cost £750,000. You can rent the studio for £750 per hr the machine they use are Flame for 3D. Smoke for Editing and Flint as a back up machine.
They create a lot of headers for Itv, history Channel, and national Geographic. The visuals for posters are owned by tag design. Who create all the images for Muller light? They do everything bar make the yoghurt.
I asked him some good questions about how long a commercial last for on TV. He said it depends on what the campaign is for and sometimes adverts go and re-appear in a few months. I also asked did an advert have to be recorded in a different format to be shown on a cinemas. The answer to this was yes.
We got to go in the boardroom to watch the show real which was really cool although the pictures on the wall were not straight. He showed us how an advert for channel 5 music weeks was made. It was the A40 on in London being played like the neck of a guitar with all the cars going up in flames. Filming the road did this. Removing all the cars off it. Re-creating the cars in Miya. The guitarist hand was filmed on a blue screen mock-up of a guitar then adapted to look like the road.
Smoke and Mirrors are always looking to take people on as runners with promotion often happening very quickly
ALAN WHITFIELD 
Leave a Reply