We’ll get through this

Framestore was key in bringing Rouse’s vision for a completely remote commercial to life. It provided some video conferencing magic and a colour grade to seven films which were all shot over Zoom and captured locally using Quicktime Player. The four actors that appear in the films each recorded their parts in a conference session while James directed them remotely on the call. 

It was Framestore’s job to take the recordings and rebuild them to resemble the four-way calls with a genuine video conferencing look. Talking about its work on the films, Paul O’Brien, Senior Flame Operator said: ‘It was a pleasure to partner again with James Rouse and the video captures we got from the virtual shoot were really natural and believable. It’s great to see him continue to get brilliant performances even if they were done entirely in lockdown with everyone in different locations. 

‘We took the Quicktime video recordings and the audio from the Zoom call and manipulated the speeds and timings of all the elements so that they synced up and matched the crucial points in the edit. Doing it this way meant we could control the amount of stutters you get when using video over wifi which was important to maintain the realistic performances and make sure it really felt like a four-way video call.’

Adding to the realism of the films, Simon Bourne provided the colour grade which needed to balance the reality of having four people in as many locations and everything feeling visually cohesive. ​