Spot on the Range

Shooting a commercial with 2,500 bison is bound to be complicated, especially when the director prefers to create effects in-camera rather than in post. This was the situation facing director Geoffrey Barish and DP Jeff Cronenweth when they collaborated in South Dakota to film Bison, a recent :60 promoting Chevy Silverado for agency Campbell-Ewald.

According to Cronenweth, Barish insisted on a series of close shots as the herd of 2,500 bison — wrangled by Duane Lammers — rushed past the camera on the South Dakota plains. This was accomplished in a limited timeframe to capture finite available light. Wrangling bison is hardly a time-efficient process.

“For the stampede, we had to have a POV among the bison,” says Cronenweth. “First, we tried planting a few isolated cameras in holes, to film the animals as they blew by, but it turned out they were unusually sensitive to noise, and they ran around the cameras. We ended up having to wrangle a few into a corral and run them in a circle, shooting very carefully to get tight crossing shots.”

Alongside the full herd, though, Cronenweth rode in a camera car along a dirt road next to the stampede, using a Cross-Country camera crane and a Flight Head gyro-stabilized remote head to dip his Panaflex camera into the chaos. “The arm is amazing,” he says. “It let us use a zoom lens out there on a 21ft. stick, with very little movement, to get the heat of the stampede.”

Barish also wanted to capture basic effects, such as the ground's shaking as the herd approaches, in-camera. To create that effect, the crew built a miniature foreground piece on an 8"×8" wood frame and added miniature landscape to match the South Dakota plains.

“The miniature had a motor system that created vibrations, and we combined that with the use of a [Clairmont] Image Shaker, a computerized camera attachment that looks sort of like a filter, with a large housing you place in front of the camera, filled with fluid that lets you shake the image being captured without moving the camera,” says Cronenweth. “It allowed me to determine composition and follow action, while still getting the shake.”