Travel Channel called us up one day with a series of spots for a show called "5 Takes". The premise of the show was that there were 5 individuals that would travel the world and "discover" the hidden treasures cities and towns that may be only be known by the locals. The local knowledge was provided be the viewers, who could email the show with tips for upcoming episodes. The information was provided to the hosts on a step by step basis, and (I think...it was a while ago) as a series of challenges. The challenge for us was that there was no footage; the show's next season was located through the Pacific Rim of Asia and Australia, and it was either in the midst of or just before principal photography. Thus, it was up to us to find an area that could provide rural (for "Surf", above), urban ("Club") and a stand-in for Hong Kong. We packed up the cameras and headed up to the San Francisco area, using Pt. Reyes for "Surf", Chinatown for "Hong Kong", and the SOMA area for "Club".

Images from "Club"

Considering the step-by-step nature of journeys on the show, we opted to shoot the footage as a series of stills to be re-arranged and threaded together with on-screen instructions, thus compressing a day-long trip into 25 seconds or so. After rigging a DSLR in a car, we drove through the hillsides and coast of Marin county, slowly taking picture after picture and constructing a journey out of what we found (the dog in the surf shop, the rusting truck, etc.) The city footage was shot by hand around San Francisco, while also giving us an opportunity to hit up one of our favorite Chinese restaurants, House of Nanking.

Images from "HongKong"

Post was largely done in After Effects, where the thousands of images were culled, re-sized and re-positioned into sequences that could then be edited in Final Cut before returning to After Effects for final color correction and titling.

~ Shot with a Nikon D70, built in After Effects, edited in Final Cut Pro. Total of three :30 spots. ~