The Shoot

Corporate videos don't usually appeal to me unless they're special and The Shoot was very, very special. In some ways it was a dream project. We were going to shoot a Chevy.

And I mean shoot

 
Mike Sellers		  O'Gara, Hess and Eisenhardt is the world leader in building bullet resistant vehicles. At the time Mike Sellers was the regional managing director for the company while Dan Heimbrock headed the company's Cincinnati-based marketing operation. They wanted a 30 second tv ad with a difference - it would show a realistic terrorist attack on a vehicle, using real bullets and with someone actually in the car.  
Dan Heimbrock

 I was asked to write the script for the ad. Nobody had ever made an ad like this before and I thought it was a natural for a 'behind-the-scenes' video of its own. The idea was pitched to Dan, who greenlit the project, and we went to work at Subic Bay Freeport in the Phiippines, one of the few places where something like this could actually be done.

The Subic Bay rainforest


To give a 'movie' feel to the ad it was shot in 16mm. The video was shot in several formats for various reasons - Betacam analogue, Mini-DV, DVC-Pro and DVCam. Australian photographer Kevin Hamdorf came onboard as a videographer. The experience sold me completely on the advantages of digital video and sopmetime later I became responsible for bringing the first Canon XL-1 camera into the Philippines.

The ad itself brought together two of my favourite people, Michael John Sarna, who was later to direct one of my feature scripts - Doomsdayer - and Matt Rosen, a British director




'Bullet proof' cars aren't bullet proof,
they're designed to give you 10 seconds of life, enough to get somewhere else, fast. None of the 40 rounds penetrated the vehicle.

and cinematographer with an incredibly inventive mind - he has several patents to his credit and he had invented some of the equipment used on the shoot. 


Matt Rosen - Incredibly inventive

Michael John Sarna - One of my favourite people

The ad, "Suburban", became something of a hit and the behind-the-scenes video, The Shoot, has been translated into several languages and been seen, in whole or in part, on tv shows worldwide.

Find out more about O'Gara-Hess and Eisenhardt vehicles here

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