The
Brief
We were invited down to the absolutely stunning Glasbury River Cottage on the Welsh border to produce a promotional video and a series of lifestyle photography to be used across the website, social media, press and editorial. With the enormous success of Wilde Lodge further down the road as a wedding venue with accommodation, Glasbury River Cottage was in need of some high quality marketing content to fully communicate not only the property itself but the lifestyle associated.
This was the most important part of this project, not focusing too heavily on the property itself but taking the audience on a journey to give them a taste of the experience. And the only way of us communicating this was to have that experience for ourselves and create a visceral set of imagery and video content that takes the viewer there in heart and mind, easing any pre-booking deliberation and making a stay at the cottage a complete no-brainer.
Client
Production Time
Team
Our
Solution
For once, the short winter days were on our side. As we needed to capture an entire ‘day in the life’ cross section of footage, the shorter day allowed us to begin shooting before sunrise and have plenty of time to capture evening and night content all in the space of a reasonable shooting schedule. However what this did require was a huge amount of planning and discipline, which is why we had a project manager and assistant on the production alongside the videographer and photographer to ensure everything was running smoothly, that we were on schedule and that the next scene was already being set up and ready to go. We also had the help of the Glasbury River Cottage team to set up a lot of the environments for us, which made all the difference and allowed us the time we needed to capture the best content we could.
We ended up with some absolutely gorgeous weather which was a real treat. Frosty mornings, beaming sun all day and beautiful sunsets. I mean, we couldn’t have really asked for much better. Having said that, this wasn’t just a happy accident. We made a call on the shoot dates less than 24 hours before packing our bags and heading to Wales, knowing full well that we needed some decent weather to really make this work.
There wasn’t budget available for any models to be used across the photography and video content, so friends and family members of the venue’s lovely owner Jemma, and even members of our own team were used throughout to capture everything we needed. This flexibility and way of working ended up being perfect for this specific project and also allowed for some really wholesome interactions which just elevated the video and photography to levels we likely wouldn’t have achieved with models.
What we produced was a 2.5 minute ‘long cut’ promotional video, as well as a 60 second teaser and a bank of almost 500 beautiful images for Glasbury River Cottage to use across all online and offline marketing materials and platforms. We worked collaboratively with the client in the edit to really shape the narrative and find the balance between showing off everything the venue has to offer but also creating an ‘experience.’
Concluding
Thoughts
In hindsight, we could have done with slightly more production time in order to slow things down and ensure we captured everything we needed. We also shifted a lot of planning time into the edit, as we knew that the narrative would develop organically, although more planning and storyboarding ahead of schedule would have allowed us to shoot for the edit more. However, the sheer quantity of footage captured and the common understanding of the look and feel of the video, meant that we captured everything we needed and a narrative was constructed that did the footage and venue a huge amount of justice.
We’re looking forward to working with Jemma and the team again in the future, with more projects in the works for Wilde Lodge and updates to the Glasbury River Cottage video content to show it in the summer months.
