Brief Explanation

A rash young sportsman challenges an old distinguished Kung Fu Master. The Master diffuses the Challenger mid-kick and ascertains his weak knee joint. The Master, who is obviously physically more resilient, feeds him 'Thomson Osteoguard', thereby strengthening the Challenger’s knees till it crushes stone, and gaining his gratitude.

Creative Execution

We started out with a week of concept brainstorming. Thankfully our client approved one of our concepts at our first meeting. We were very excited about the idea they had chosen as it promised a chance to be creative with the execution. However we not only had a tight budget of 10k for production, we also had a tight timeline, four weeks for the project, with three weeks of production preparation and one weeks for post production. So we dived right into casting while simultaneously location, wardrobe and prop sourcing. We managed to get the talents suitable for the role, and train them (they needed to look convincing in a martial arts role) in a week. Our concept required a location with a unique blend of qualities. It needed to have a setting like an old Chinese house, fully furnished with rosewood furniture, weapons and old style tiled flooring. It also had to have high and strong enough beams for rigging up a man, yet wide enough to do an extreme wide shot. We scoured Singapore and approached countless martial arts and Chinatown shop houses. We finally found a location that suited our needs from Singapore Land Authority. However last minute SLA rejected our application for the location. We held an emergency meeting to discuss alternatives. We decided we would not find a suitable location in the time we had left, so we decided to go with shooting on green, this way we could save money on props and art department without compromising the original art direction. As about 80% of the final visual would need to be computer generated we shifted one week from production to post production. We had a lot of planning to do. Our Director Sherwin has a strong background in video compositing, and thus was able to use his expertise to plan out the various clean plates we would need, at which scenes and how to best utilize shooting on green. Fortunately we have a resourceful flexible team who adjusted quickly to the new location and it’s numerous new concerns. Special preparations were made to mark and record down details of the shots to facilitate the post composition. With the new 3D approach we relied on our strong post team to rise to the challenge. Of the two weeks they had, 2 full days alone were required to go through all the rushes and pick the best shots, with their relevant plates. A lot of effort went into creating the best environment for this concept; we utilized the chance to have complete control over little details like tile design and colour, the texture and colour of the walls, window frames, etc. Even environmental elements like dust and sun rays were carefully crafted. All this took tremendous planning to ensure the lighting of the shoot would follow the vision of the Director in post. All in all it took teamwork , level headedness and the ability to perform under pressure to pull off this TVC with success.