Inspiration: “Sunshine” by Doug Nichol
March 25, 2012 · Posted in Uncategorized
Sunshine from American Buffalo on Vimeo.
UPDATE: OOPS, they’ve taken it down. Note in comments suggests agency wasn’t happy about it.
Every once in a while I come across something on Vimeo that blows me away. This short doc by Doug Nichol is one of them. “Sunshine” looks at the conflicted life of an American advertising producer who is filming fast food ads in China to sell to the Chinese. Watch it. Every shot is great and the timing and pace of the dialog is well done.
According to Wikipedia and IMDb entries, Nichol is a Grammy-winning music video producer and an experienced commercial cinematographer.
Craft helps tell stories. Take a look at this for some serious inspiration.
Comments
5 Responses to “Inspiration: “Sunshine” by Doug Nichol”
Thanks for the pointer, Chuck. Wonderful short. Loved it from start to finish.
It is a beautifully shot piece, but I hope it doesn’t serve to discourage single shoots from doing their best work. It’s easy to produce this kind of amazing, lush photography when you have a commercial crew with you. It’s more of a challenge for most of us freelancers where the cost of even having a second shooter may be the difference between a quote where we win a shoot or not.
You can do great work without having a crew and $100k cameras, and SteadyCams and all that other stuff. You have to dig back into your still photography roots and recall how to improvise.
That’s when the magic happens again.
Steve – This whole piece looks like it was shot as a one-man-band with one lens to me… except for the ad footage inserts, of course. No fancy sliders or steadicams…. that’s why I liked this piece. It’s just good, simple camera work.
I’ll take another look, Chuck, it I’m always skeptical when they produce something that looks this good, and then I find out it was done by a commercial production company and probably had a lot more resources behind it than it seems at first look. Then we all get upset and wonder why we’re not doing stuff this good, until we find out how many people were really involved.
PS, they seem to have taken the video private on Vimeo. You can’t watch it any more. (Word in the advert trades was that McD and TBWA, the Agency, we’re very upset they weren’t asked for permission to produce it.)