Creating the right image

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Vijaya Cherian looks at how Macmillan Adam brings life and colour to a corporate film produced for Al Habtoor Leighton Group.

Dull, gloomy grey skies transformed to a warm and inviting orange landscape … dusty hazes cleared to unveil Dubai’s attractive urban skyline ... construction projects in progress cut between beautiful architectures and the men who helped build it, be they CEOs, engineers or the construction workers. This is how Dubai-based production and post facility Macmillan Adam created a corporate film for Al Habtoor Leighton recently.

The video was to focus on the company, its real estate projects and how its people contributed to the progress of the Middle East, especially Dubai and Qatar.

Making a construction project in progress look attractive in a corporate video requires a lot more than just imagination. It requires a special skill at the editing table so that the video can stir emotion in the audience just as a well-made feature film would.

“It has to be like a human being that lives and breathes and can draw emotion and provoke thought,” explains Hamish Adam, managing director of Macmillan Adam and script writer on most of the company’s corporate videos.

“This can be evoked through visuals, sound bytes, music and several other elements that are introduced at the post production stage. Doing a corporate film can be interesting because it is akin to producing a feature film; this is why we mostly do only corporate videos. I find commercials less exciting because you are hamstrung by someone else’s story board plus the market for TVCs here is extremely competitive,” explains Adam.

The Al Habtoor Leighton project involved a 28-day shoot and 80 days in post. The footage was shot on a Sony HDW 750P camcorder in 1080i. Macmillan Adam created a four-minute film and a 20-minute version for the client.

One of the big challenges of this shoot was showing half-completed construction projects and making them attractive, filming labourers in action and making some of the work they did, look impressive. Additionally, the crew was only permitted to shoot in certain areas.

“We had some pre-defined areas in which we could work and had to make things up within that area,” explains director Carl Greinar.

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