Video games; Honkey Kong by Christian Åslund

Christian Åslund is a Swedish photographer, 
based in Stockholm. Christian has a background as a photojournalist working for newspapers, magazines and NGO’s, documenting a variety of armed conflicts, environmental and social issues. He also shoots commercial and editorial photography, capturing life’s moments with a twist.

Honkey Kong

The mission of the campaign was to do a tribute to classic 2d platform video games, old-school side-scrolling games like Donkey Kong, and let a person navigate the streets. I have my background in photojournalism and even if this was an advertise shoot, I wanted to keep the retouch to a minimum, instead of shooting towards a greenscreen or white backdrop in the studio and using a composition in post production, we wanted to shoot it live on location in Hong Kong. They feeling of the images being shot in the field is more authentic and very difficult to resample in the studio.

A couple of weeks later we went back to Hong Kong with a very small production team of three people, me as photographer and creative director, a production manager and an assistant. Instead of bringing professional models with us, we knew it was more about the feeling of the images and that a too big of a crew would slow us down. Therefor we decided to shot it within the team, using ourselves as models, and also found some additional people on the ground that we could use.

The most difficult was to get access to the different rooftops and to be able to scout as many locations as possible. The language was also an issue so we needed local fixers who spoke Cantonese. We contacted a local film school and got hold of two students that we hired as fixers. The production schedule was very tight so we only had two days of scouting and doing test shots, then two days of shooting the series of 10 images.

By shooting from as high above as possible, using a tele lens to make the images more flat, it was possible to create the feeling of the model being the players alter ego, the character, and the actual image would be the players perspective. We then used walkie-talkies to communicate with the persons on the ground, fine-tuning them in the right perspective and also having a overview of incoming traffic since we were actually in the middle of highly traffic streets, and did not have time, or budget, to close it of. [Official Website]