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Filmed in Turkey — PepsiCo Walkers “A Feast for the Senses”

4 min readNov 1, 2021

After a long silence, I’ve decide to go on with our behind the scenes stories. Here is the job we did in April’19 for Walkers Sensations’ TVC. The spot is shot in two days in a backlot studio in Istanbul to double three different street markets; Indian, Mexican and American.

Location

The most challenging part of this project was to find the right locations which can be doubled as three different countries and they had to be production friendly to build those street markets. There are very good options to cheat India, Mexico and United States in Istanbul (as we did in our Delta Airlines job). But as the project required big set builds, we needed to close those streets for pedestrians and vehicles at least for 2 days to set up and shoot. So, it was not feasible for this job to shoot on real streets. Also, we need to complete the shoot in 2 days due the budget constraints, which pushed us to find one location for all the scenes without any unit moves.

To be able to achieve all the requests within the limitations, we offered to build those setups in a backlot studio which already had appropriate streets with different characters. At the end, all the parties were very happy with this location and our production solution.

Production Design

In this job, we’ve worked with a very talented local production designer. As you guess, cheating a location required a very detailed production design process and serious preparation to convince the agency and the client. So, we created mood boards, detailed drawings for each market scene, and planned the placement of the stalls on the streets for the most cost efficient way without comprimising the visual quality.

The Indian market drawing and street plan
The mood board for Indian market
The final set design

Food Styling

Due to the nature of the project, food styling was an important part of the pre-production process. Herbs, spices, cheese, meat and many others, the ingredients of the product and they were the heroes of the scenes. Fortunately, we have top notch food stylists in Turkey and we worked with one of the best in this job, so we were in safe hands. To save time on shoot days and be on the safe side, he organised a cook-up day in his own kitchen studio to present all the prepared ingredients to the director and the creatives a day before the shoot.

Cook-up day

Equipment

The DoP preferred to use a RED Helium with a Zeiss lens set. The camera was always on a steadicam for all the scenes, so our steadicam operator was the hero of our set. His performance was incredible during 12-hours shoot days with that heavy equipment, and he was really appreciated by the DoP and the director.

Red Helium 8K
The hero of the set; our steadicam operator

Social Media Videos

Besides all those scenes with a pretty busy schedule, we produced additional social media videos as well with a second unit. For that, we put a green background in a space next to the main set and stole our hero talents from there during the breaks to shoot those extra pieces.

Green screen setup for social media videos

The Behind The Scenes Video and The Spot

Please see the making of video and the original spot below:

Tell us about your project!

If you like to know about the cost of producing your commercial / movie / documentary / music video in Turkey, please contact me for a bespoke quote and location alternatives. I’m based in London, and would love to hear about your project.

Emre Ozgur

emre.ozgur@gogo-project.com

+44 7899 288 880

www.gogo-project.com

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Emre Ozgur
Emre Ozgur

Written by Emre Ozgur

I’m an executive producer based in London, mostly producing commercials for European agencies/clients in Turkey and Eastern Europe.

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