Our friends at Golley Slater know that when it’s the 11th hour and you need a solid production turned around sharpish, we’re the ones to call. With a tight timeline, a gaggle of actors required and the ever-evolving guidance and restrictions at the height of the pandemic’s introduction, it was looking like a challenge…but that’s the kinda stuff we get off on.
We worked closely with the agency to work on production approaches to the creative that made sure we were operating COVID-safe, as well as trying a number of ways to achieve a bit of a trick shot—where we reveal that our main talent was talking to a person in-situ all along, rather than to us as a viewing audience.
Deciding on a set build to allow us as much control as possible, we assembled a crack team for the project—our first TVC project with pre-production done remotely. Yeah, you do miss a bit of the excitement from experiencing the team lasso sheer chaos in-person, but thanks to our solid production processes, we slipped into a groove really early on and smashed one deadline after the next.
Knowing agencies often have to wrangle multiple parts of a campaign like this, we do our best to just take the load off—a worry-free experience as much as possible so that they can focus on the larger objectives of their campaign and keep their efforts pointed towards the client-side stuff. We love forging the kind of relationship where agency creatives and PMs can trust us to make choices that are for the sake of their client and for the best possible outcome for the campaign, not just stuff we think is cool.
On the day, we managed a busy but socially-distanced green room with a one-in-one-out style approach to talent management on-set, whilst capturing a multitude of options to satisfy not only plan A, but also all the others through to somewhere near plan F or G, as we knew the guidance and lockdown rules were like predicting the lottery at that point…
…and thank the heavens we did plan for that, as an announcement that changed lockdown rules came from out of nowhere on the shoot day itself.
We thought ahead to try and mitigate this as much as possible, including getting an editor on-set to put together the ad using the rushes shot throughout the day. That was a godsend, helping us, agency and client to all review the shots and sequences to check that they conformed to these new rules, which resulted in a frankenstein-like concoction of a bunch of options, which actually worked really nicely.
