Thanks to Allen Chen and his team at Future Shop who helped make this project a lot of fun.

These are some images that document the filming of the Cellshop video.

Here’s a project we did for Future Shop to help promote its Cellshop brand. This was shot mostly in Montreal and utilized tilt-shift photography to make the real locations feel fake and miniaturized. We animated our little cart traveling around town looking for the right cell phone and plan. An awesome 8-bit soundtrack was composed by Op-music who also created the Future Shop rift ringtone at the end.

We built a cityscape background (made of various cans, of course), and designed the lighting (using flashes) to look like natural sunlight. Like the others before it, this clip was still shot using our photography approach (Canon 5D - without live preview, Canon 24-70mm 2.8, and 16-35mm 2.8 lenses, remote capture software, and sensitive lighting).

Shooting cans is technically complicated as their tin surface reflects everything in and around the set – it’s like shooting a bunch of tiny mirrors (not ideal for stop-motion). Therefore, we had to close off the set and shoot every frame behind the curtain. Otherwise the can characters and the can cityscape background would pick up our reflection.

The satellite was made from a small Del-Monte fruit cup (diced peaches in light fruit juice syrup). The solar panels are Intel Pentium CPUs attached together with the can opener handles from canned ham. The satellite was suspended using a thin metal wire and magnet.

The setup for the dreamy hill descent scene. To create the romantic mood, we shoot into the setting sunlight. Therefore, not only was there the rapidly setting sun to deal with, there were also levels of complication added by the fact that fall was already upon us in Montreal. It was tricky finding a location where the camera wouldn’t see the autumn colours and days of cooperative (i.e. sunny) September weather.

The map of the world can formation scene consisted of about 200 cans. This scene was shot backwards, so the first step was to build the map out of cans. Many thanks to our production assistance on that day: Jean-Marc, Angie, and 3-year-old Alexis.