Not only was there a sneak preview of the action packed new film Vantage Point for Screen Africa readers but also a special give-away of a Sony Cybershot Camera valued at over R3,000 made possible by Vantage Point, Sony and Ster-Kinekor Distribution. The question posed for the question “Who is the director of Vantage Point?’ was of course Pete Travis. The lucky Screen Africa reader to win the camera by answering correctly is Diek Grobler from Arcadia, Pretoria.
Grobler who says he entered the competition on a whim is an artist, animator and animation director, and part of a two-man animation company called Fopspeen Moving Pictures. “For love, we make short films using stop-motion animation. One of our films, Little Bang was nominated for a SAFTA award in 2007. For money we do all kinds of animation, and are currently working on The Justice Gang for SABC 1,’ says Grobler.
Vantage point releases on the 11 April and stars Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt. Using new camera and editing techniques, Vantage Point takes the action genre to new heights and levels of skill from a film maker’s point of view. Editors, directors and DOPs as well as camera operators will be fascinated by the new camera and editing techniques used to tell the story of from the different points of view of eight strangers who witness an assassination attempt on the president of the United States.
Filmmakers were called upon to use every tool available to differentiate the stories. Whether it was through the use of different lenses, or different film stock, or lighting, or different ways of shooting, such as handheld cameras, Steadicam, dollies, they used different tricks to try to make each of these stories feel individual, to keep the audience interested in the twists and turns and invested in each character’s story.
For director Pete Travis this story was a chance to explore the idea of “the truth’ – and the fact that truth is in the eye of the beholder. As Vantage Point unfolds, the film explores the period immediately before and after the assassination attempt from the unique points of view of eight key participants – ranging from the president himself to the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him to a tourist in the square only by chance.
