The Arab Producers’ Union’s

Vol. 14 Issue 1 January 2012An ITP Business Publication

CABSAT 2012PREVIEWED!

PRODUCTIONOn location in the Hindu Kushwith RMSI and its camera crew

CASE STUDYUniversal Film Makers endsequipment headaches

IN THEMustafa Salamah in his own words

TECHNOLOGYThe latest from the world ofprofessional video monitoring

UNION

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CONTENTS

JANUARY 2012 VOLUME 14 ISSUE 1

04 NEWSMore TV support needed / New Abu Dhabi production house / Globecast trials HBBTV / Litepanels in the dark / Local integrators’ event triple / MBC goes HD.

REACH FOR THE SKYDubai-based MEDEVAC provider RMSI recently took a fi lm crew on location on Afghanistan and Iraq to bring home the reality of its every-day blockbuster movie.

MONITOR THE SITUATIONTake a delve into the latest from the world of professional video monitoring. It’s come a long way since the cathode ray tube went down the tubes.

CABSAT PREVIEWCABSAT returns to Dubai World Trade Centre inFebruary 2012 set to be bigger and better than ever. We look at what some key exhibitors have in store for us next time round.

PRODUCTSAll the latest products news, including the very latest in 4K restorationfrom Image Systems.

FIVE MINUTES WITH…Icon Art Production’s Zakir Hussain.

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CABSAT UPDATEWe hear from local integrators about what to expect from them at CABSAT 2012, set to take place in February 2012.

A VERY BUSY MANMustafa Salamah is the General Secretary of the Arab Producers’ Union. He also sits on numerous governmental committees, and this year won an honourary doctorate. We caught up with him.

UNIVERSAL APPEALUniversal Film Makers is a new project which off ers the very latest equipment, advice and assistance to aspiring fi lm makers.

CARRY ON FILMINGAbu Dhabi Film Commission’s David Shepheard and 2011 Shasha winner Mahmoud Al Massad on the commission’s work, and what to expect from its latest grant winner.

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AFGHANCorporate shoots in the middle of Afghanistan’s warring provinces put a new

slant on day-to-day work for one Dubai-based production team recently, and we heard all about it from the people involved.

Stunt planes, smoke grenades and location shooting in the wilds of the Hindu Kush may sound like the stuff of Holly-

wood blockbusters, or hard-hitting report-age from Al Jazeera or CNN. For the crew on a recent shoot for Dubai-based emergency medical service provider RMSI, however, it was, in fact, a corporate shoot quite unlike any they had taken part in before.

RMSI CEO Rob Lamb adds a little more background: “The purpose of the shoot was to show what RMSI is doing every day in these war zone situations. We’re largely

unheard of outside of our core customer base – we perform MEDEVAC services for people like Shell, Exxon Mobil and the UN, so they’re pretty high profi le, but nonetheless we’re not really known outside those circles.

Of course, working in war zones, it suits us to be under the radar to a degree, but we felt people needed to see what we do. We found customers were coming to us and the only record we had of our work was the odd mobile phone photo or clip and we felt it was time for a better calling card.”

Working in such an environment is never simple. Lamb recalls how members of his

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team were arrested by intelligence services in Kabul while photographing a client’s house for their records – data that is stored to speed up response if required. The team spent a whole day in jail awaiting verifi cation of who they were and what they were doing.

That said, at least the fi lm crew were from Dubai, so the idea of fi lming permissions wasn’t alien to them, even if the war zone set-ting was. Lamb adds: “Permissions are diffi cult, but in some ways fi lming in Afghanistan is easier than fi lming our own jet in the UAE. As long as you make the necessary arrangements with the police and inform the military, in theory that’s it. In practice of course, you can’t talk to every military currently operating in the country, and they don’t always talk to each other. Once, on the shoot, we were in a remote area letting off smoke grenades, and the New Zealand military spotted it from miles away and turned up to see what was going on.”

The unique situation meant that Lamb ultimately had to take on a somewhat directo-rial role, he explains: “I have no experience in fi lm, aside from studying it at high school. It

was challenging for the crew being told what to do by a

non-fi lm maker, as it would be if a photographer was telling a doc-

tor what to do, but it was an unusual situation. We had complex stuff like aero-

planes and crowd shots in sensitive areas, and the guys really didn’t know what we could and couldn’t fi lm without getting arrested or shot, so I came up with a fairly complex storyboard based on what I knew.

“We even had a code for changing memory cards. The footage was so valuable, and impos-sible to get again with the costs and logistics. At check points we’d swap the cards for dummy footage, and we were constantly copying the footage onto multiple sticks, cards and hard drives for extra security.”

Freelancer Jarn Elo was a cameramen on the shoot. He adds: “It was a real eye opener. We listened really carefully to the guys who had lived and worked there about when we could take our cameras out and simple things like that. We’d been on shoots on construction sites in Dubai, and you get those long safety briefs. When we shot in Iraq it was the fi rst time

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EDITING/POST Adobe Premier AfterEff ects

KIT LISTa

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9Duration, in days, of

RMSI’s shoot, covering Iraq, Afghanistan

and Dubai

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ON LOCATION

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ON LOCATION

we’d paid attention to every word. They were talking about stuff like getting out of the car behind the wheels so we’re not exposed to gunfi re under the car.

“One day we were shooting in a market in Kabul, and I wanted to shoot from the roof, but the crew decided against it as sit-ting on top of a car, holding a camera that could be mistaken for a machine gun, and looking ‘American’ (Elo is Finnish) may not be the wisest move. It was pretty freaky to hear these kind of things!”

“It was a challenge too because retakes weren’t an option. Flying planes costs a lot of money if you need a retake, so we had to get everything fi rst time, and we were con-stantly checking that batteries and memory cards were ok.”

The nature of the shoot also dictated the equipment Elo and his colleagues brought with them. Lamb notes: “We had to take the minimum of equipment. We couldn’t take more than two fi lm crew, both practically and because we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Battery packs were essential too as we were in remote areas with no electricity.”

It will probably come as no surprise to learn that these limitations meant the crew opted for the portability of Canon’s D5, As Elo explains: “Canon’s cameras and their size were ideal. You can get away with more because it’s so small. We’d have had trouble with an EX-3 or similar, but most people see the Canon and just see a camera. It’s also easy to

run with if needed!“The Glidecam was great for

long steady shots, and a lot easier than bringing a whole Steadicam

rig to Afghanistan. We dumped the footage on hard disks at the com-

pound and brought it back for editing in Adobe Premier and After Eff ects.”

In all the shoot took nine days – three each in Iraq and Afghanistan, two on RMSI’s air ambulance jet, and a fi nal day at the response centre in Dubai, and Lamb is pleased with the results: “We’ve done thousands of rescue missions that could be made into Hollywood movies, but nobody will ever see that. At least by staging our shoot we can give some idea of what we do every day.”

Elo too was satisfi ed with the experience, though he’s not in a rush to repeat it: “It was really interesting to see these places I never normally would, but now I’ve been I’m not sure I’d take the risk again. I loved the work though. In Dubai I usually work with lots of jobs at the same time, so it was nice to have a big project to focus on for a time.”

There has been a further unexpected side eff ect Elo’s case, as he’s found himself transformed into something akin to an international spy in immigration offi ces as he carries on his less dramatic work around the region: “I get loads of checks at airports in the region now – a white guy with a

camera and Afghan and Iraqi stamps in his passport arouses a lot of suspicion– I didn’t have an

easy time the last time I tried getting into Bahrain!”

As the saying goes – it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

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We’ve done thousands of rescue missions that could be made intoHollywood movies, but nobody will ever see that. At least by staging our shoot

we can give some idea of what we do every day.

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