In our post on stock footage we discuss how we use it effectively in our productions. A great example of how to do this is our piece for Shangri-La’s Festival of Chinese flavours. A project that came to us in late 2018 with an incredibly tight turnaround of less than 3 weeks.

Shangri-La – A Festival Of Chinese Flavours

The festival was to celebrate the Chinese food culture in 18 Shangri-La hotels across China. Our brief was to produce the promotional campaign to launch the event.
Because of the logistics of visiting 18 different locations within the production timeframe, never mind the creative and rest of production, the client believed that stock would be the best way to produce this. However, after discussions it became apparent that a stock film would not suit the style of the piece. It would not show the properties and likely produce a final piece below the standard required.

To create the desired style for the film we knew we would heavily rely on those moments between actions. The camera finding focus or moving into position. All the fat that is cut from stock clips.
Because of this it was decided I would fly out and direct a 3 day shoot across three locations; Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Kowloon. Shooting with our local friends from Lime* we filmed the hotels during the day and hit the city streets at night, uploading footage back to the UK whilst we went. This meant that whilst we were filming the editors were able to build sequences and let us know what pickups we needed to blend the previously chosen stock footage seamlessly.

Both the project and campaign ended up being a huge success both internally and with its results, winning Best Commercial (NETB) 2019 at the Royal Television Society.

stock

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Ross Dixon

Creative Director