In the spirit of “Balls of Fury” (2007) comes this ping pong commercial shot for Casio. Mike Mier writer and director shares with us the “behind the scenes making of” in his production write-up. An over the top hilarious commercial certain to entertain we think you’ll appreciate the production value of this commercial shot on 35mm film.

Lav Productions

Photography credit: Lav Bodnaruk & Navid Nourani

Mike Mier, Writer & Director write-up:

Project: Ping Pong for my was really an experiment into the viral format. I wanted to blend the standard perceived notion of the short film genre and blend it with a TVC/viral format. I think the results worked out really well. Especially for the idea we delivered.

Obviously the idea was to create an underground, extreme “DEATHMATCH” ping pong tournament that also roughly spoofed Fight Club.

I also wanted to play on the notion that Ping Pong players were generally regarded as “nerdy” and really use that to put spin on the impact of the Death Match.

LAV PRODUCTIONS prides itself on shooting on 35mm and we had the opportunity on this production to bring back several of our favourite actors and let them go nuts in some crazy roles. Check out Daybreaker’s and Undead’s Mungo McKay as the GRAND MASTER of PONG…. LOL.

On a more technical level I had a really distinct visual style I wanted to achieve on this piece and worked with DOP Matt Floyd (we previously teamed up on the short A Difference In Shadow http://vimeo.com/6186761)

Matt Floyd, Director of Photography write-up:
Our key influences were a combination of the urban artwork featured in the
production design, and the work of DP Jeff Cronenweth, ASC on Fight Club.
However, we wanted the style to be almost a send-up of the Fight Club scenario,
whereby these guys are fighting it out, but over a game of Ping Pong. Our whole
concept revolved around contrast, and taking these ordinary looking guys and
putting them into this rather funny world where ping-pong is treated like a
death match.

In the build up scenes, we gave the film a more classic commercial look, using
nice soft bounce light to key the actors, as well as clean almost static
framing. Once we get inside the fight club it’s a lot darker, dirtier; we
started to frame our shots through the bodies of the crowd and let the camera
move a bit more freely. We started with a steadicam shot coming out of the
darkness, small tungsten down-lights reveal just a little bit of our lead
actors faces, as we weave through the crowd towards the game table. Our aim was
to try and build up the tension of the match with this long steadicam shot,
revealing the grittiness and the atmosphere of the whole room and what awaits
our guys. Then once the ping-pong match starts, it becomes very stylised
particularly in the way of varying frame rates. This gave the visuals a
violent, staccato feel that would throw the viewer right into the intensity of
the game. Smoke also helped during this sequence, catching the strong backlight
to give texture to the key action and depth to the crowd.

I worked closely with gaffer Matt Parnell to get the right texture out of the
background graffiti; we used 300w Mizars gelled with ¼ CTO and Chocolate brown
gels to give them an earthy tone. Then for the actors, we decided to keep them
in hard backlight whenever they were at the ping-pong table. We also threw a
couple more 2k Fresnals pointing straight down on the table surface, which also
ran 2 stops over key. We wanted the lighting in this sequence to be hard a
crisp, helping to give the action a violent tone.

Since we knew the colour style that we were going for (and with the film only
been a few minutes long), we opted to do the final grade during our one-light
transfer session. Our main philosophy again was to show contrast between their
working lives and the ping-pong match. We warmed up pre-fight scenes, giving
them a prettier look with more of a saturated, broad colour palette and then
for the game scenes we pushed further into those earthy tones, while
de-saturating parts of the colour palette. Our telecine colourist was Scott
Harris at Cutting Edge Brisbane, and he did an outstanding job of understanding
our vision and gave the film the perfect balance.

Project Ping Pong was shot on 35mm Kodak Vision 2 & 3 film stocks using an Arri
35-III with Zeiss lenses.

Matt Floyd

EndNote by Mike Mier, Writer & Director:
On a post production note this film was a bit more complex then normal. The
ping pong ball throughout the whole piece is CGI. As we shot on 35mm with a
EXTREMELY small budget and a shooting ratio of roughly 3:1 there was no way we
could use a real ball. I also don;t think I would have gotten the
uber-stylized and exaggerated performances with a real ball.

As a result Post FX guru JOE LANCASTER from JOE MEDIA came onboard and did all
the ball FX and comping in a mixture of AVID and After FX. He was able to
create a seamless and realistic ball that gave the piece a new edge.

Further to the ball comping was the Sound design this piece needed. It was the
old ‘chicken or the egg’ adage with sound on this one. I always wanted the
soundtrack to be part of the diagetic match play so it was integral that both
synced perfectly.

Sound designer Shaun Richardson tortured himself for this film and came up with
the exceptional design you here. The Ping pong sound is actually Shaun
manipulating drum machines beyond hat would be called decent.

I hope you enjoy Project: Ping Pong as much as we did making it.

Check out www.lavproductions.com for more of our work.

Cheers,

Mike Mier
Director /Producer

Promote Post