The team at ChristchurchNZ collaborated with Orly Creative to bring this powerful ‘Do Winter Different’ television/digital campaign to life. The creative concept was to take a ski lift chair, including a family of four, fly them many hundreds of kilometres across Christchurch and north to Kaikoura, then across to the West Coast, down to Mount Cook and finally landing for a great ski experience at Mount Hutt.
So we quickly jumped onto the task of bringing it to life. The initial brief was fairly straightforward if you subtracted the laws of physics or had a multi million dollar budget for a ski lift built from Cashel St, in the heart of the city, to Mount Hutt via Kaikoura, the West Coast and Mount Cook. Unfortunately, we had neither physics or a budget that size, so Orly Creative called upon our years of experience to execute this production.
Pre-production and planning was key as many different shots would need to be composited to achieve the desired look and feel. We also needed a massive studio space to ‘fly’ a full sized ski lift, with four people on board. A massive blue-screen was set behind the hoisted chair, so we could composite chair shots into different scenes. Direction and timing was key, as the talent on the chair lift had to interact with their environments as they travelled on their journey, also the position of the lift, speed and direction had to perfectly executed, and wind machines were used to make it even more life like. We then went to each location to tie it all together, with a combination of live action, aerial and vehicle shots. We also shot a range of photography for online promotion to accompany the television commercials and video content.
We’re incredibly proud of the end result, and ChristchurchNZ saw huge increases in traffic and sales to all stakeholder regions.
