TOURISM IRELAND

Tourism Ireland wanted to create a series of online content (15 videos and a whole collection of stills), aiming to highlight the warm welcome that visitors will receive when visiting the Island of Ireland.

The shoot took place within 2 weeks of receiving the brief and was limited to 6 (continuous) days of shooting, due to budget constraints. The original concept was developed by Publicis and Space66.

From the very first minute, the only concern we had was with pre-production, and more specifically 2 aspects: The Talents, and the Locations.

Six days on the road with a crew of 8 people meant we had to produce on average at least 3 videos per day, as well as a series of stills to go with it. And all of this with the shoot taking place, of course, in Ireland, while the pre-production was lead by a small team of 3 in Publicis’ London office.

So to make sure we wouldn’t end up with Irish hosts who would be uncomfortable in front of the camera, we sent our favourite Director (Stuart Black) along to pick the talents and develop the narratives we would be focusing on during the shoot.

A huge part of this was, of course, the ability to use Tourism Ireland and their connections to source partners for both talents and locations we would have never had access to otherwise, especially in such a short time.

While this was taking place in the offices of Publicis, we started pulling together the people who would be our crew for the week-long shoot. It was paramount, for the success of this project, that we had the right director and crew to make the hosts feel comfortable and get the most out each of them. Logistics were handled by Space66, Film/Photo Equipment, crew and transport was sourced by Soda Visual.

The shoot was completed in 6 days, in December of 2017, travelling in a hired bus from Belfast to Dublin to Ireland’s Ancient East finishing in Cork before flying back to London. Our amazing team was composed of a Stills photographer, an experienced director, a sound recordist, a DIT, a Producer, A self-shooting DOP and a Driver.

Shooting in Ireland in December can be really tough, especially considering the number of deliverables we were hired to produce. So the schedule evolved as the weather forecast evolved.

The smooth running of the shoot relied predominantly on the hard work and experience of our crew during production and the flexibility of all involved. 

The Deliverables were quite varied, consisting of a series of bitesize content ranging from 5 seconds – 1 minute and a set of stills. So the focus was put on the talent first, always starting with a setup interview, then followed on with Gvs and fillers to help tell the story we wanted to tell. And to makes things a little more fun,  the content had to work both at 16×9 ratio and 1×1 for Instagram.

Having both Publicis’ Creative Director behind the concept and the Tourism Ireland representatives on location was a huge help, approving work as we went.

We usually make sure to handle post-production ourselves whenever possible, to insure the continuity of the creative process from conception to delivery and a high standard and attention to details.

In this particular case, Space66 handled everything to do with Editing and Grading the videos while Soda Visual handled the Stills’s Post-Processing only.

“The longform content would be displayed on Tourism Ireland’s YouTube page, with the remaining assets running as paid media across social platforms in a number of countries including Germany, Spain, France, USA and Italy.”

– Space66

The result is the following series:

We only produced the first 16 videos in the playlist above. The rest was produced a few months later by another team and added to the playlist.

While it’s been a super fun shoot in the end, the pace and the sheer amount of assets to produce made this experience into quite a telling one. It showed, or rather confirmed, that having processes and contingency plans in place is what makes all the difference.