Filmed in Turkey — LV= Insurance 2020 Campaign
During these lockdown days, I had a chance to turn back and go over our previous projects. I realised that last year was a busy one for us with many local and international jobs. Among them, I’d like to share our experiences on the most challenging, interesting and intense one, which is for a British insurance company Liverpool Victoria — aka LV=.
The job was for LV’s 2020 campaign consisting of 3 main TV spots and several social media contents. We shot all those in 5 days with a 2-day-prelight and of course with our hard working great team. As you’ll see in the upcoming photos and BTS videos, we built all those locations in two studios while we had just 3 weeks for all the construction work. And I must say they were not easy setups as I’ll be explaining in the following sections.
Set Building
We had 8 different setups for these spots and all of them were built from scratch in two different big studios next to each other. Those are;
- Forest / camping site
- British residential street with Victorian houses
- School front
- British neighbourhood park
- Office building entrance
- Local football field
- Beach front
- British home interior
As per the creative, the setups were not just simple, static structures. The whole houses were needed to be moving, most of the furniture was supposed to slide, flip, and even the walls and the floors were moving as well. So, besides building them, we needed to put heavy duty casters, tracks and pulley systems on many parts of the setups.
After building the set, the backgrounds were another issue. Since we needed huge backgrounds (like 20x6 meters), we were planning to print them out on vinyl sheets and hang them on the walls. But once we printed a small sample and tested it, we found out that the material was quite reflective and would have been a problem when the set is lighted. So after a long discussion with our DP, gaffer and art director, we decided to go for custom printed wallpapers which worked very well at the end.
Besides all those set building work, there was another important part of the project; cars! As two of the films are about car and multi-car insurance, we had 3 cars in different segments. And of course they had to be wrapped in the brand’s colors.
There was a very big challenge about the cars in this project. As the spots would be aired in the UK, the cars had to be Right Hand Drive, but in Turkey it’s the opposite, all the cars are Left Hand Drive. And we found a way to work around it; we ordered RHD dashboards for these specific models from the UK and switched their dashboards and steering wheels to make them look like RHD.
Let’s see our set building BTS video here;
The Grip Job & Some Tricks
Many moving big and small objects mean a lot of grip job of wiring them, installing pulley systems and pulling the right strings with the accurate timing in a great coordination. I can’t forget that in one setup there are 18 strings to be pulled, and as far as I remember we achieved the desired movement sequence after 8 trials which was a huge relief for all the team.
Besides all those moving things, there was another challenge about the costumes. In one scene, our main talents’ outfit needed to be changed from casual to sport ones and it had to be done in a second and the old outfit needed to disappear as well. Our wardrobe and grip teams worked in collaboration to make this happen. Custom clothes were prepared, necessary strings were attached and here is the result:
All the scenes for 3 main TV spots were shot with Steadicam, so it means 4 days full time job for our Steadicam operator. Ideally, those films should have been shot with a motion controller unit to be able to achieve smooth transactions between the scenes. But as you guess, due to the limited time of pre-production and budget optimization, we couldn’t use it. But thanks to our great operator, we pulled it off with his good physical condition and pitch perfect movements. He was the hero of our set during those difficult 4 days.
The Lighting
As we had a huge studio and set builds, we needed a big lighting setup. Also, we had 3 hero cars in the films, we had to build enormous soft boxes with double silk layers — the biggest one was 25x12 meters — to avoid light marks on the cars.
So during these 5 shoot days, we used 50 space lights, 30 soft lights, 16 Sky Panels and around 20 tungsten lights in various sizes from 1K to 12K.
As you’ll see in the films in the next section, there are morning, afternoon, and night scenes with invisible transactions. So, we needed to adapt the light of each scene to be synchronised with the camera movements and have correct timings. With the help of our time coded lighting desk and talented operator, we pre programmed all the light setups with the time codes and everything worked smoothly. It was a very good experience for both our DoP and gaffer.
At the end, it was a very challenging, educational and pleasing experience for all of us. Once again, everybody was very happy and satisfied with the result as you can see in our traditional wrap selfie;
The Backstage Video and The Spots
Now it’s time to enjoy the BTS video and the spots, after a long reading. The third spot hasn’t been aired yet, will add it once it’s out.
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, location alternatives and our remote production solutions. I’m based in London, and would love to hear about your project.
+44 7899 288 880
