GENERAL

SOFIA

Wealth. It's about attitude.

The Garage. Shot on location in a garage in Espoo.

 

Maspalomas. We shot this with our spanish production crew in Cartagena. It was a very cool shoot with some hair raising incidents. However everything clicked in the end and we got it done. We spent around five days and managed to get some MTB riding done in the hardpacked tracks on the Murcian coastal hills. Sweet!

Slalom. The final one. We shot this pretty much immediately upon arriving in Finland from Spain. We shot this in a beautiful log cabing maybe 100 km north of Helsinki. The day was cold and crisp which was funny because we started the project in the very last days of the summer. We actually did our initial planning over some beers outside at a sidewalk cafe.

 

 

MAYHEM

 

This was a really cool project we did for the Finnish Police Academy. They were short of new recruits and needed an ad that'd have people crowding their door. The agency, Daddy Finland, were really cool with us and gave us a lot of slack with devising a script. The idea was to come up with an image that looked like something from a cop show on TV. They just asked us not to spill too much blood and go easy on the gore. We were actually shooting for InterContinental in Rio at the time and took some time off  our busy schedule to come up with the story. We must have all watched too much television as it was more a question of ruling stuff out than trying to come up with something.

In the end we came up with "The hideout" which is your basic heist scenario. It's the story of a crew pulling off a job and then being busted by the cops in their hideout. We had a really dodgy Skype chat with the agency which kept breaking up. It was frustrating as we had a real time challenge at the time with the schedule in Rio and avery minute counted. Well everything got presented in the end and with a few tweaks from the agency we were good to go. My phone calls were pretty funny after that...."gimmie six AK:s, four Glock 19:s, two squad cars, two police vans, empty cartridges etc..."

We finished up in Rio eventually and had a really tight schedule to shoot in Finland once we returned. We were all jetlagged and had to really focus to make sure everything got done in time. We found (thanks Juuso!) a really cool garage in Tampere to shoot the project in. It was right next to the club premises of a local rough motorcycle club. They must have been worried with all the cops around their place. Luckily the whole set remained a fictional bust and we got to shooting. Jussi had managed to get a severe cough in Brazil and was suspecting it was the swine flu. He refused to shake hands with anyone and was hobbling around semi conscious and coughing. It was pretty comical. In the end we got the set setup with our biggest problem geing the fact that our getaway truck was so big that none of us had a license to drive it. Obviously driving it without a permit to set full of police was not hte smartest move so we made some calls and it got sorted in the end.

We had a ton of equipment with us but ended up not using the big ProFoto Battery packs all that much. The main lights on each sides are done with them as are the flashing blue lights of the cop cars. All torches were done with Canon Speedlites and PocketWizard radio triggers. It seemed to work pretty well with all the smoke we pumped into the set. Everything is shot in pieces and you'll find the FLC415 crew up to no good in the final image. I think we wrapped up at around midnight or one in the morning. We then drove back south to Helsinki and dropped all the AK:s to the Lord of War on the way. In the end everything was unloaded and secured into the office at around four in the morning which was the time everyone else was hobbling home from the clubs.

RIO

 

We shot with InterContinental Rio de Janeiro for just over two weeks in the summer of 2009. It was an interesting case as we had plenty of time and the whole crew with us.

WIRTANEN

 

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HOSTILE

 

I was happily killing January in Spain when I got a call from Suunto. They wanted to shoot underwater with me and my initial question was "Great, when are you coming over?". To my horror the reply was "Dude, we're shooting in Finland. In February." Images of warm water and sunshine were replaced by visions of the dark frigid waters of the Northern Baltic Sea around Åland. Not to mention the cave diving in freezing conditions in Southern Finland. Who could say no to that. Of course I was in.

I packed up my stuff and left the sunny Mediterranean behind for a trip into the freezer. Our first diving days were in a flooded mine in southern Finland. On the way to the site I noticed a road side thermometer display -18 degrees Celsius. I thought the thermometer was laughing at me.

The first day consisted of running our equipment checks. Not just for cameras and strobes but the diving equipment too. Diving in such harsh conditions is risky as regulators can freeze shut or free flow underwater resulting in denied access to your breathing media or then just dumping it rapidly. Everything seemed to be working fine despite the regulatro failure of one our our team members inside the cave. And no, he didn't drown he swithed to my backup regulator and we got out safely.

The run times on our dives were up to 100 minutes and in that time the hole we had cut into the ice had frozen over. We literally had to break the ice from below to exit.

 

 

Diving in such harsh conditions has challenges on the surface in addition to just dealing with 3 degree C water. Upon exiting the water everythig starts to freeze instantly. All housings and strobes must be hurried indoors to avoid potential flooding on the next dive due to ice in the o-rings. Strobe batteries need to be charged and the team needs to be reheated. rehydrated and fed. We did two dives per day which was more than enough in those conditions. I was using an electronically heated vest under my dry suit as well as filling the suit with Argon instead of air. Our maximum operation depths were at around 40 m so we were breathing Trimix, a mixture of oxygen, helium and nitrogen in the bottom and decompressing on Enriched Air Nitrox and pure oxygen.

 

 

After our checkup day we ended up shooting for another three days. We got some good stuff despite some minor setbacks. Shooting underwater has its challenges. Mostly due to the fact that all communication is done with signalling with your hands or primary light. Signalling is especially tricky in a cave environment as you're in eternal darkness with no ambient light. Needless to say that if you point your primary light into your buddys face, he'll be blind for a while. So it's tricky and everything has to be well thought out and executed as planned.

 

 

We packed up our stuff and headed to the ferry for another three days in Åland, an archipelago between Sweden and Finland.  The area is known for its well preserved wooden wrecks which are rare in the world. Probably the other place to dive such pristine wooden wrecks would be the Great Lakes in Canada. After a rough night on the ferry we arrived in Åland and got geared up and got to our dive boat very early. The sea was grey and uninviting and it was snowing. The deck hands would clear out the dive deck from snow before the dives and clear it again before we exited. They also had hot drinks and sandwiches ready for us for when we got out of our gear.

 

 

Despite the harsh conditions, the dives were good and we got stuff done. Our biggest problem was visibility. The water was pretty murky on the shallow wrecks but on the deeper ones it improved. The only issue is that diving deeper means less bottom time and more decompression. Diving with long decompression in the open sea is risky as conditions may change rapidly and equipment is also susceptible for malfunction in such cold waters. This was the especially case on our deepest dive. Reaching the final stage of decompression at around five to six meters I switched from my last Trimix deco gas to pure oxygen and realized that my reg wasn't sealing, but instead trickling gas through it. Just as I was hoping that it'd reseal as I exhaled warm gas through it, it started free flowing. I had no choice but to close the tank not to lose my precious oxygen. I ended up having to open and close the tank with every breath. This doesn't sound like much but when you're wearing dry gloves and having to keep them below your body it results in all the gas escaping from them. And then you get cold, really cold and in the worst case you're hands will be out, and you won't be able to open and close the valve to your gas supply any more. Luckily after maybe fifteen minutes it started to hold if I breathed extremely easily, which is not good for decompression either. But all's well that ends well and the whole team made it up and out in good health half an hour later.

 

 

After an efficient three days of wreck diving it was time to say goodbye to the beautiful archipelago. It was also time to say goodbye to the team as we headed into different directions. They returned to Helsinki but I had a meeting in Stockholm and then managed to sneak two dives in the fantastic Sala silver mine into my calendar.

 

Written by Jussi Hyttinen