PRIVATE CRIMES
On-air campaign for CI Polsat (A&E Networks) , Creative Producer / Director - Agnieszka Lesiewicz , Models - The Magic Camera Company , Voiceover - Jamie Glover & Agnieszka Lesiewicz
The Making Of
Private Crimes is the first Polish series on the channel.
In the promo we wanted to bring the world of crime right to the doorstep of our viewers, in extreme close-up. Evil was to literally knock on our door.
“To illustrate the proximity of crime,” says Agnieszka Lesiewicz, the director of the promo,” I came up with an idea of using re-enactments of the actual crime scenes from the series with miniature models. I first tried out the idea at home, using a clump moss from my garden, some little twigs, a piece of card-board and a handful of miniature people from a local model shop.”
“Using models helped us emphasise the idea of showing real crime in close-up and enabled us to re-create the crime scenes much more vividly than would be otherwise possible,” says Martin Gent, the Head of Crea-ve of CI at A&E Networks.
We created a set of five story-‐boards, based on the actual crime scenarios from the series.
Then our project took us to The Magic Camera Company, based in Shepperton Studios, which specialises in the intricate and highly detailed process of model construc-on and has famously created the model of Hogwarts Castle for the Harry PoIer movies.
They set off crea-ng sets for our five crime scenes and customising the models for each scene. The models were moulded, re-‐painted and arranged for each scene.
„I don’t think we’ve ever worked with anything so small,“ said Jose Granell from the Magic Camera.
The shoot took 12 hours of painstaking model building, ligh-ng and filming the models and miniature figures, each the size of the diameter of a 20 groszy coin.
Our tiny sets and actors were shot on the state of the art Nikon D4 camera, fixed to a mo-on control MILO rig. This fast and agile robo-c camera system is able to repeat high-‐ speed moves with precision and stability. Using the rig, which is the size of a small elephant, may have seemed like using a cannon to kill a mosquito, but its ability to perform and precisely repeat minute movements was essen-al to our shoot.
The final touches were added to the promo in post-‐produc-on at the London office of A&E Networks. The voiceover was provided by Mirosław Baka, already associated with the channel having filmed the Hidden Faces of Crime campaign last year.