The project
The agency Harte Hanks, in Philadelphia, asked The Gate Films to make a 360 fire safety film for its client ADT. It puts the viewer in the middle of a house fire: at 2am a young mother takes a call from a calm ADT professional and moves through the house as the power dies and beams collapse, until firefighters save the family.
The film was for an American audience but was shot in suburban Manchester, with child actors, a lot of 360 visual effects and a real home filled with smoke. It promotes ADT’s Pulse App and the real people who respond from its monitoring centres.
What we did
The Gate brought us in as the camera team, with Ben Huss as director of photography and Sununu Hernandez as camera operator. The script put one scene in low light in a room full of smoke, and another among fire and visual effects. The all-in-one 360 cameras of the day had small sensors that got noisy in low light, so we worked with The Gate and the hire company Brownian Motion on a different rig.
We shot on two Panasonic GH5S cameras with Entaniya 250 fisheye lenses, recording V-Log L at 10-bit 4:2:2 to leave room for the grade. We used each lens’s full 220-degree field of view, so the action would not cross a stitch line.
How it was shown
In January 2019 Harte Hanks mailed first-time homeowners in the US a pack with a cardboard viewer: they put their phone inside it to watch the film. ADT also showed it in Oculus Go headsets at CES 2019.
In March 2020 the campaign won four ANA International ECHO Awards: the Golden Mailbox, Best Use of Emerging Technology, Best Use of Direct Mail, and Consumer Services.
Credits
- Client
- ADT Security
- Agency
- Harte Hanks
- Production
- The Gate Films
- Director
- Martin Percy
- Camera team
- Immersi (credited as SkyEdge 360)
- Director of photography
- Ben Huss
- Camera operator
- Sununu Hernandez
- Post-production
- Process Moving Image
- Binaural sound design
- Marcus Alexander
- 360 kit
- Brownian Motion