Schellens

Thed Lenssen. One of the world’s greatest commercial directors. Well, if he’s the one calling to invite you for a meeting, you get in your car pronto. And next, if you end up the only party after a rigorous selection with all kinds of film production companies, you’re proud. Very – very proud!

Lenssen asked us if we could produce a number of productions for his company, The-Cfilms. Duh – what would you do? And this wouldn’t be Thed Lenssen we were dealing with, if the standards weren’t high. Therefore, the first project we took on for him, needed to become a visual explosion. Fortunately, our commissioner provided ample ammunition for that.

Assignment:
Design an arty mood-flick for textile producer Schellens. Schellens takes the wool of the Angora goat and spins it into a special yarn, dyes it and weaves it into beautiful, exclusive fabrics. These fabrics, in turn, are applied by renown furniture designers like Jan des Bouvrie. Therefore, Schellens desired an exclusive film. Featuring near-surrealistic images and threading the strings of the visual emotion. A film the colours of which burst off the screen and in which all shots receive an almost Science Fiction-like lighting. Wow! What a challenge that was!

The Shoot
With only one single day for shooting, we turned out to have cut our timing closely. It was not the actual shooting that took so much time, but figuring out the proper lighting did. Director Lex, cameraman Thorsten and production-assistant Nadien started off early in Eindhoven. The entire concept and the form of the shots had already been discussed at length with Schellens’ art director in the briefings. For that matter, nothing was left to chance during the shoot. Eventually we headed for Amsterdam feeling a little anxious, to present our final cut of the flick to Thed Lenssen. So, all right, we were quite pleased with what we’d made, but how would such an experienced and demanding man feel about this? Thed was very content. Only a few marvellous shots had to perish (as Thed says: ‘Kill your Darlings’) before we delivered our flick to the customer. Schellens was very impressed. Up to this day, the film is shown all over the world on conventions and used as promotional material for the Schellens-product line.