We’ve all been brought up watching television commercials. From aliens making mash potatoes to heart-warming families pouring Bisto gravy over their Sunday lunch, advertisers have had to be creative to grab the audience’s attention and get their message across.
With so many other advertisements fighting for your attention, we need to stand out from the crowd and get noticed to reach new people.
When planning a new advertisement, it’s vital to put yourself in the shoes of your target market and think about all of the benefits your product brings and clearly communicate this creatively and engagingly.
We started by speaking to event organisers to find out what they believe their groups get from time away at our venues. This was the easy part. Then we needed to turn that into a story that fits into 45 seconds and keeps people interested.
Our event organisers told us that time away was essential to reconnect, leave their everyday lives behind and draw close to God. It gives their group a chance to spend time listening and encouraging each other and space for them to be themselves.
With our key messages clear, we then crafted a strapline that would resonate with those watching to capture the essence of why Christian Conference Trust exists. For this we chose: This is where we belong…
We then sat down with our videography company and started to plan the film shoot. It didn’t take long for the story to take shape and we had a commercial sketched up into scenes.
For this advert we needed a cast of actors and actresses to play the parts of guests. Sometimes it’s possible to capture real guests throughout their stay but often filming demands many hours of setting up scenes and retakes from all angles so on this occasion we recruited a local talent agency to find us a range of people to represent a group staying with us.
The day of filming started early by preparing the venue to make sure that each location was dressed correctly, staff were briefed, meals prepared, and the script was run through. At around 10 am the cast arrived. Many had worked together before and some met for the first time so they sat together in the lounge with a coffee to get to know each other. This gave us a great opportunity to film them naturally. Many of the shots you see in the advert were simply taken of the cast chatting amongst themselves.
Then we moved around the centre to each location to capture the key messages. For this, we used the gardens, a bedroom, coffee lounge, meeting room and dining room. Every scene and part of the day was planned to the minute to ensure that all of the filming could take place. The one thing we couldn’t control was the weather, so backup locations were earmarked in case of rain. Fortunately, we picked a day in March with not a cloud in the sky!
As well as two videographers, we also had a photographer who took pictures as we filmed, to provide us with images for press adverts and our website to complement the campaign.
At 8pm we finally had all of the footage we needed safely on camera memory cards. The last scene was around the firepits as the sun went down. For this, we got the drone out and captured some great atmospheric shots as the light faded.
The next day, the videographer started editing 3 hours of film captured on two digital cameras. This needed to be condensed to only 45 seconds so much of the footage didn’t end up being used.
When the rough edit was ready, we viewed it and contracted a professional voiceover artist for the narration and chose background music to bring the advert to life.
Two weeks after the day of filming, the final edit was ready. We hope you like the end result and that it captures why it’s so important to take your people away from their everyday lives for some time out together.
