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.