One of our Alpha’s, Magnus Wake, was recently brought in by The Union agency. He’s directed many commercials for various production companies and regularly gets used for campaigns. In this case, it was for a Scottish Government commercial for ParentClub.

In the unique circumstances of the COVID19 pandemic, this was going to be a little different, pulling together a commercial where he couldn’t be on location. This meant providing phone direction and support as well as tips and tricks to help families shoot their own content.

This was a big collaboration between the agency and the client who had their own contacts involved, as well as specifically found households that were up for a challenge.

One of the biggest hurdles was to streamline the post-production, where materials were coming in various formats with different degrees of technical knowhow from those filming. Also, a director will typically sit next to an editor and work closely with the creatives on a job, but with no-one able to meet up this wasn’t going to work. The solution? A live stream of the edit suite output shared over a conference call.

The whole commercial was pulled together on BrightWolf’s in house 8k edit suite. However, with the agency not able to attend, we had to stream our edit suites output securely to the Unions creative team, Euan and Paul, both juggling life at home while still working. This really pushed the boundaries for creative working. It was so successful that BrightWolf has now invested in extra technology so that in the future anyone wanting to work in this way can do so remotely but still have the workflow as if they were sitting next to the editor. We also worked closely with Susan and Dora from the account handling team to support their timescales for getting the ad cleared by Clearcast. The final commercial flew through a sound mix and a quick colour grade in our suites before being delivered via Peach. It was shown online and in various broadcast slots including Britains Got Talent and Good Morning Britain.

Music was composed by Callum Rankine with production being handled by Lewis and Dave at Filming Scotland… in fact, so many were involved it just highlighted how people have been pulling together in these challenging times.

This was a lovely commercial to make, something that was technically challenging but incredibly effective and emotive to the final viewing audience. Hats off to the many that were involved!

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