Using two perfectly synchronized cameras – one loaded with standard color film, the other containing black-and-white infra-red stock – director Philip Kates and film school chum dop Doug Koch deliver a surreal color experience in a spot for Body Fantasies body spray.

Day one and two of the three-day job, which came direct from New York client Parfum Du Coeur, took place in Toronto’s Studio Oasis on a massive set – 80-foot-long narrow corridors and 16-foot-high ceilings – described by Kates as ‘Frank Lloyd Wright meets Total Recall.’

The ad starts off with a woman waking up in a cramped compartment in a massive futuristic wall. Dressed in layers of black chiffon, she makes her way down a corridor towards a shallow pool containing fuchsia water, the first splash of color in the black-and-white spot.

When the colored water starts to ripple and the wind begins to blow, the woman exits the set (this is where the technical part comes in) and finds herself on a beach exploding with surreal colors. The camera cranes skyward as she runs across the sand.

To achieve a confined look, the corridors of the set were built as tight as possible, too small even for a dolly. The camera was mounted on the end of a 30-foot crane arm which stretched the length of the hallway and was operated by remote control, moving above and beyond the actress to capture her from different angles.

The exterior scene, which looks like it takes place at an exotic beach, was actually lensed at Bluffers Park in Toronto and was shot using two cameras linked together by a special experimental-type rig, the brainchild of Koch.

Twinning, which is what Koch calls his invention, allows two cameras to shoot the same image at the same time using a beam splitter (a two-way mirror on one side and a window on the other) between them.

In this case, one camera contains regular color film stock, which is used for the chroma or color information, while the other is loaded with black-and-white infra-red stock, used for the tonal impression of the scene.

‘In other words,’ explains Kates, ‘we are taking the infra red, which turns blue skies black, has incredible haze penetration, gives you very unusual highlights, smooth skin tones, turns foliage bright white and gives a very unnatural ghostly impression of the scene, and colorizing it by means of the color version of the same scene which has been pin registered to match the black and white.’

What do they gain by shooting like this? ‘A surreal color experience that cannot be achieved in any other way,’ according to Kates, who says the entire spot looks as though it was filmed on Venus.

The advantage of twinning over colorizing in post, he adds, is that colors have already been separated, saving the editor considerable time and effort.

‘It was always my thought that black and white would look interesting [in this spot],’ says the director. ‘It immediately interprets the real world. With black and white you always have an interpretation, you always have something that has associations with nostalgia.

‘But when you go from black and white to color, the color can seem like a letdown because it can often look too literal, too snapshot, or too much like a postcard. I felt we needed to do something special for the climax, so we had the color bring us to a special place and not just back to reality.’

Panic & Bob editor Michelle Czukar is handling the offline and Axyz is looking after the special effects. PS