TECHNOLOGY The latest from the world of professional video monitoring CASE STUDY Universal Film Makers ends equipment headaches PRODUCTION On location in the Hindu Kush with and its camera crew CABSAT 2012 PREVIEWED! IN THE UNION The Arab Producers Union s Mustafa Salamah in his own words An ITP Business Publication Vol. 14 Issue 1 January 2012
JANUARY 2012 VOLUME 14 ISSUE 1 CONTENTS 22 51 34 64 04 NEWS More TV support needed / New Abu Dhabi production house / Globecast trials HBBTV / Litepanels in the dark / Local integrators event triple / MBC goes HD. CABSAT UPDATE 18 We hear from local integrators about what to expect from them at CABSAT 2012, set to take place in February 2012. 22 31 34 A VERY BUSY MAN Mustafa Salamah is the General Secretary of the Arab Producers Union. He also sits on numerous governmental committees, and this year won an honourary doctorate. We caught up with him. UNIVERSAL APPEAL Universal Film Makers is a new project which offers the very latest equipment, advice and assistance to aspiring film makers. CARRY ON FILMING Abu Dhabi Film Commission s David Shepheard and 2011 Shasha winner Mahmoud Al Massad on the commission s work, and what to expect from its latest grant winner. 39 44 51 64 72 REACH FOR THE SKY Dubai-based MEDEVAC provider recently took a film crew on location on Afghanistan and Iraq to bring home the reality of its every-day blockbuster movie. MONITOR THE SITUATION Take a delve into the latest from the world of professional video monitoring. It s come a long way since the cathode ray tube went down the tubes. CABSAT PREVIEW CABSAT returns to Dubai World Trade Centre in February 2012 set to be bigger and better than ever. We look at what some key exhibitors have in store for us next time round. PRODUCTS All the latest products news, including the very latest in 4K restorationfrom Image Systems. FIVE MINUTES WITH Icon Art Production s Zakir Hussain. www.digitalproductionme.com JANUARY 2012 1
AFGHAN Corporate shoots in the middle of Afghanistan s warring provinces put a new slant on day-to-day work for one Dubai-based production team recently, and we heard all about it from the people involved. Stunt planes, smoke grenades and location shooting in the wilds of the Hindu Kush may sound like the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, or hard-hitting reportage from Al Jazeera or CNN. For the crew on a recent shoot for Dubai-based emergency medical service provider, however, it was, in fact, a corporate shoot quite unlike any they had taken part in before. CEO Rob Lamb adds a little more background: The purpose of the shoot was to show what is doing every day in these war zone situations. We re largely unheard of outside of our core customer base we perform MEDEVAC services for people like Shell, Exxon Mobil and the UN, so they re pretty high profile, but nonetheless we re not really known outside those circles. Of course, working in war zones, it suits us to be under the radar to a degree, but we felt people needed to see what we do. We found customers were coming to us and the only record we had of our work was the odd mobile phone photo or clip and we felt it was time for a better calling card. Working in such an environment is never simple. Lamb recalls how members of his www.digitalproductionme.com JANUARY 2012 39
team were arrested rest ed by intelligence ig ence services in Kabul while photographing ogra phin a client s house for their records data that is stored to speed up response if required. The team spent a whole day in jail awaiting verification of who they were and what they were doing. That said, at least the film crew were from Dubai, so the idea of filming permissions wasn t alien to them, even if the war zone setting was. Lamb adds: Permissions are difficult, but in some ways filming in Afghanistan is easier than filming our own jet in the UAE. As long as you make the necessary arrangements with the police and inform the military, in theory that s it. In practice of course, you can t talk to every military currently operating in the country, and they don t always talk to each other. Once, on the shoot, we were in a remote area letting off smoke grenades, and the New Zealand military spotted it from miles away and turned up to see what was going on. The unique situation meant that Lamb ultimately had to take on a somewhat directorial role, he explains: I have no experience in film, aside from studying it at high school. It KIT LIST 2 x Canon 5D mark II 1 x Canon D7 1 x GoPro HD 1 x Canon 16mm-35mm L 1 x Canon 24mm-105mm L 1 x Canon 70mm-200mm L 1 x Shape DSLR Rig 1 x GlideGam HD-2000 1 x Glidetrack 1m 1 x Zoom h4r Recorder 1 x Sennheiser shotgun microphone 1 x Electrovoice RE50 interview microphone 1 x Rode Top microphone 2 x Litepanels top light 1 x Cleaning kit 1 x Canon timelapse machine 1 x Tripod 1 x Monopod EDITING/POST Adobe Premier AfterEffects 9 Duration, in days, of s shoot, covering Iraq, Afghanistan and Dubai was challenging leng for the crew being told what to do by a non-film maker, as it would be if a photographer was telling a doc- tor what to do, but it was an unusual situation. We had complex stuff like aeroplanes and crowd shots in sensitive areas, and the guys really didn t know what we could and couldn t film without getting arrested or shot, so I came up with a fairly complex storyboard based on what I knew. We even had a code for changing memory cards. The footage was so valuable, and impossible to get again with the costs and logistics. At check points we d swap the cards for dummy footage, and we were constantly copying the footage onto multiple sticks, cards and hard drives for extra security. Freelancer Jarn Elo was a cameramen on the shoot. He adds: It was a real eye opener. We listened really carefully to the guys who had lived and worked there about when we could take our cameras out and simple things like that. We d been on shoots on construction sites in Dubai, and you get those long safety briefs. When we shot in Iraq it was the first time 40 JANUARY 2012 www.digitalproductionme.com
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we d paid attention to every word. They were talking about stuff like getting out of the car behind the wheels so we re not exposed to gunfire under the car. One day we were shooting in a market in Kabul, and I wanted to shoot from the roof, but the crew decided against it as sitting on top of a car, holding a camera that could be mistaken for a machine gun, and looking American (Elo is Finnish) may not be the wisest move. It was pretty freaky to hear these kind of things! It was a challenge too because retakes weren t an option. Flying planes costs a lot of money if you need a retake, so we had to get everything first time, and we were constantly checking that batteries and memory cards were ok. The nature of the shoot also dictated the equipment Elo and his colleagues brought with them. Lamb notes: We had to take the minimum of equipment. We couldn t take more than two film crew, both practically and because we didn t want to draw attention to ourselves. Battery packs were essential too as we were in remote areas with no electricity. It will probably come as no surprise to learn that these limitations meant the crew opted for the portability of Canon s Canons D5, As Elo explains: plains: Canon s cameras as and their size were ideal. You can get away with more because e it s so small. l. We d ed have had trouble with an EX-3 or similar, but most people see the Canon n and just see a camera. It s also easy to 2 Total number of film crew present on the shoot run with if needed! The Glidecam was great for long steady shots, and a lot easier than bringing a whole Steadicam rig to Afghanistan. We dumped the footage on hard disks at the compound and brought it back for editing in Adobe Premier and After Effects. In all the shoot took nine days three each in Iraq and Afghanistan, two on s air ambulance jet, and a final day at the response centre in Dubai, and Lamb is pleased with the results: We ve done thousands of rescue missions that could be made into Hollywood movies, but nobody will ever see that. At least by staging our shoot we can give some idea of what we do every day. Elo too was satisfied with the experience, though he s not in a rush to repeat it: It was really interesting to see these places I never normally would, but now I ve been I m not sure I d take the risk again. I loved the work though. In Dubai I usually work with lots of jobs at the same time, so it was nice to have a big project to focus on for a time. There has been a further unexpected side effect Elo s case, as he s found himself transformed into something akin to an international spy in immigration igra offices as he carries on his less dramatic work around the region: I get loads of checks at airports in the region now a white guy with a camera and Afghan and Iraqi stamps in his passport arouses a lot of suspicion I didn t dn have an easy time the last time I tried getting into Bahrain! As the saying goes it s a tough job, but someone one has to do it. We ve done thousands of rescue missions that could be made into Hollywood movies, but nobody will ever see that. At least by staging our shoot we can give some idea of what we do every day. 42 JANUARY 2012 www.digitalproductionme.com