She’s a Taiwanese princess. She’s the Madonna of Hong Kong. She’s even got an asterisk in her first name! Vancouver’s The Ace Film Company took this exotic superstar, a king’s daughter who gets fined for shaking her royal hands with fans, and brought her to 7,000 feet of elevation on Whistler’s famed Blackcomb Mountain.

Only in the commercial business.

According to Ace honcho Parker Jefferson, A* Mei, the spokesperson for Coca Cola China’s Sprite soft drink beverage, had never seen a snowflake in her life. So, throw her on a snowboard and shoot her down the mountain? Not likely.

Luckily for the Ace crew, good ol’ entrepreneurial Canada has the infrastructure in place for these kinds of high-altitude antics. Jefferson explains: ‘As it turns out, the three-time Canadian border-cross female champion is up at Whistler and running a bit of a casting service. She provides talented athletes for this sort of thing. And, she’s exactly the same size as Mei, which is like five-foot-two or something. So she’s the body double and the stunt double.’

Before going into detail on the storyboard, Jefferson made clear Ace’s two-fold role on the project. ‘What they [agency clients] do quite often in Hong Kong is associate themselves with singers who do a song. And on their latest album, that song is related to a television commercial which is produced at the same time.’ Ace was busy producing both pieces.

First, the commercial: A* Mei and two friends (stunt doubles) are on snowboards at the top of the mountain – not on the groomed ski hill but rather the untouched powder of a heliboarding slope. Heliboarding is a sport which favors helicopters over chair lifts.

They begin boarding down the hill, but as they approach the treeline, the paparazzi are lying in wait – on snowmobiles. As the photographers see them go by, they begin following the princess and her friends down the hill, trying to snap the perfect picture that will pay them the big bucks.

After a short chase, the snowboards approach a cornice (a big snow cliff). They stop and A* Mei takes a slug of Sprite. Then, realizing the snowmobiles can’t follow them over the edge, they jump the cliff, stop and look back up. The paparazzi has halted at the cornice, only to find the princess and her friends waving and videotaping them right back. The waving snowmobilers are visible through the video camera’s flip-out screen. Then, a special effects blizzard swirls around her as the commercial closes on the royal pop star drinking Sprite.

Jefferson, an avid skier, was prepared for the challenging shoot. ‘Seems like every year we do a couple of these snow jobs – if you will. My partner and I are pretty much locally focused and we really like doing these kinds of things.’

Madonna scene

Even though Ace kept the crew down to 20 hardy souls, they also had to deal with 27 Coca-Cola executives from China, their families and A* Mei’s full entourage of boyfriend, personal assistant, hairdresser, make-up artist, manager and agent.

‘They just sort of hung around,’ Jefferson explains. ‘It really was like a Madonna scene. All these people we had to deal with were way more than we had on crew. And dealing with them at elevation like that – we were very fortunate we had good weather. Otherwise, it would have been nasty.’

Luckily, Ace didn’t have to blow the budget on snow shoes. Says Jefferson: ‘The snow up there was fairly firm. You could sort of walk around on it. But you know – you’re trying to wheel the 35 mm package – and it’s not easy.’

Again, despite the difficult location, Whistler was blowing only Zipideedoodahs. Jefferson is impressed.

‘There’s actually a company in Whistler that provides support for this sort of thing. [They] have these big snow coaches that take 19 people and other ones that take all the gear. And they drive up the mountain. It takes about an hour to get up there. And we do that before the hill opens in the morning. So we saw some of the most spectacular sunrises that people had ever seen.’

Jefferson was very busy on director Derek Chang’s shoot. He explained that he wore ‘three hats’ on the set. Despite the high alpine winds, the Ace executive wasn’t talking toques.

‘[I was] executive producer, because I own the company. Line producer, because I have more experience producing this type of thing than anyone I know and, I just like doing it. [Finally], because I have worked with this director [Chang] before, he asked me to be second unit director.

‘So I was usually away from the main set, which I thought was kind of nice. I was shooting snowmobiles, doing stunts like jumping off knolls and blasting through the trees. [Also], some Steadicam work, shooting snow boarders in extreme locations.’

With two cameras going all the time, the production required two dops: Allen Jones and Lew Reese. Reese, working with Jefferson on the second unit, has a wealth of ski shoot savvy.

Jefferson: ‘Lew Reese is really one of the most experienced. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Rap Pictures – but they’re the first guys who started doing the extreme skiing videos, back in the eighties.’

Produced for creative director Lee Jet Lam of Leo Burnett Hong Kong, the shoot started with two days on Blackcomb then moved to a studio at Thomas Special Effects in Vancouver for the product shot (on blue screen). The next day, they went to Vancouver’s The Plaza Club to do the music video part – the rave party part.

Ace, producing both the commercial and music video, explains the Hong Kong-style tie-in. Says Jefferson, ‘The commercial is kind of included in the music video.’

He explains: ‘For the music video, we shot a kind of rave party and we had a bunch of fake snow going through all the people. They’re going to post [in] a screen in the club that wasn’t there when we shot it. They’re going to play scenes that we’re shooting for the tv commercial on [screen] while they’re dancing.’ The post will be completed at Centro in Hong Kong.

Although Sprite bottles are in the hands of many of the dancers and all across the bar, replacing liquor bottles, Jefferson confirms that Coca Cola China did not pay for the music video.

‘They were two separate budgets. I think the record company [Taiwan’s Forward Music] must have been paying for that [the music video].’

Despite a commercial budget of ‘about half a million,’ Jefferson sacrificed his health for the project. Coughing, he explains, ‘It just about killed me.’

Even with painful lungs and a nasty virus, Jefferson is pleased with the budget he says that, ‘for Vancouver is quite large.’

He elaborates: ‘This year, I bet three-quarters of our billings are going to be these foreign jobs. It’s kind of hard to make a living on Vancouver budgets. The budgets here have really shrunk over the years. And locally generated commercials (have been on the decline). Over the past few years, we’ve really started to market ourselves internationally.’

The spot will air in March, on tv in Hong Kong.