11.20.09 - Norton Anti-Virus Campaign Video

Two days after the Playstation game shoot, I had another shoot for a Norton Anti-Virus Promo Campaign. (Click here to read about the campaign).

Basically, at the beginning of the campaign, there was a video to introduce a story about catching digital criminals, (click here to see it) and the PV I took part in was the video to close the campaign. This was the most interesting job I’ve done for a number of reasons.

The director was British, and the AD was Danish, so it was probably the first time in my work history that I could communicate with 100% fluency to people in both positions.

Beyond that, as you can see from the video, it was shot in a public bath which meant mosiacs on the crotches, spending most of the shoot in a hot tub (which sounds cool at first but gets tiring after the 4th or 5th hour straight), and trying to do a fight on very slippery floors. (So much in fact, that the 'Police Chief' was actually able to slide me across the floor at the end.

In the PV, my character was a ‘Yojimbo’ (A Yakuza Boss’s right hand man/bodyguard) but I was the center of the commercial and had almost all the dialog. This was challenging because it was ALL, not just in Japanese, but in Kansai-Ben,( the accent that people speak in the Osaka area), which I have had almost no exposure to.

Because the director wanted it to be re-written in Kansai-Ben (most Tokyo-ites think it’s a really comical dialect), the script wasn’t finished until the night before, and I didn’t actually get it until 11:00pm- and we were expected to be on location by 6:30am the next day.

Thankfully, we were filming sequentially, and I wasn’t needed until the 5 or 6th scene, so I had a few hours to go over my lines with a Japanese assistant. And we drilled them. It was tough, and (unfortunately for the other actors) it took a helluva lot of takes to get through my scenes. Now I know how Lazlo (who is Hungarian) must have felt during the Playstation commercial. Everyone was really cool and patient though, so I was pretty happy about it.

I also got to do the fight choreography for my scene. There was more I wanted to do (utilizing elements of the environment) but I the director wanted to steer clear of anything that was too dangerous looking. Apparently doing a pseudo-naked fight was risky enough.