Shooting Gallery Asia

Heading up the team behind Shooting Gallery Asia are two highly talented creatives – Freddy Kee and Sebastian Tan. Since it’s founding in 1987, Kee and Tan have turned Shooting Gallery Asia into a one-stop shop, providing commercial production, photography services, digital imaging, content development and production design and support to the Asian community as well as foreign productions shooting in Asia with offices and/or studio facilities in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Shanghai, Paris, New Zealand and The Maldives. These two dynamos and their teams have won everything from the Cannes Gold Lions, the New York Gold, the Australian Pencil, the Clio Awards to the Asian Pacific Entrepreneur Awards, Asian TV Awards, the Singapore Creative Circle Awards and most recently for the second time, Marketing Magazine’s AOTY Award, for the best production agency of the year 2012.

Shooting Gallery Asia began their relationship with MSE in the early 1990s. As one of the largest production houses in Singapore and the region, they require strong back up for their high-profile clientele. “The service standard and support we get from MSE is consistently high and innovative,” says Tan. “Their increasing range of new products and improvements to their standards has brought us what we needed – always at the right time.”

For over 20 years, Shooting Gallery Asia has relied on MSE – counting on their ability to supply the Asian market with everything from the smallest clamps to the big-ticket items like the new FloatCam DC-Slider series. “It’s been faxes, e-mails – and finally a face-to-face at Broadcast Asia 2011,” Tan adds. “Meeting Robert Kulesh and his team in person reinforced our feeling for MSE, the quality of their people and the quality control they maintain over their equipment. There is a trust between us that we sometimes take for granted.”

Recently, Shooting Gallery Asia needed support for an overseas assignment – support that required one of MSE’s most popular new items – The FloatCam DC Slider. An urgent e-mail to MSE in Burbank, and the DC Slider was on its way so Tan, Kee and team could fulfill their promise.

Having the DC Slider on this particular assignment was important to Freddy Kee. “It’s comparatively lightweight and easy to set up,” he says. “We didn’t have to be concerned with the uneven ground or the conditions at our difficult locations. At the beach, we needed a dolly shot but had very little time to do so. Setting up a proper track and dolly would have been time consuming and involved a lot of logistics. With the DC Slider, we were able to achieve the tracking shot simply and in a much shorter time. Love it!”

While in Singapore for Broadcast Asia 2012, the MSE team set up a rare on-site training on the nuances of DC-Slider for Shooting Gallery Asia. Adrain Quek, one of the company’s DoPs as well as many of their staff met with MSE’s Robert Kulesh and Tyler Phillips, to learn how the DC-Slider worked with even the smallest of today’s digital cameras – the Canon 5D; the different possibilities of set-up that many don’t realize at first glance; and how the new FloatCam Motion Control System fit into the DC-Slider operation.

“With the new Motion Control, we will be able to automate the tracking of the camera system while the operator concentrates on operating the camera and the framing, without having to track manually at the same time,” Quek says enthusiastically. “The system will also allow us to add movements into our time lapse shots, giving us additional creative possibilities.”

“Having Robert and Tyler to our studio to give us a real hands-on experience is just what you’d expect from a company like MSE,” says Tan. “Tyler really knows his stuff and he helped us understand a lot more about the Slider that will be of great use to our company and our clients in the future. For them to take time to come by after the craziness of Broadcast Asia 2012 was a very nice gesture – and we really appreciated it! Thank you MSE!”