If you know us, you know we love a good challenge! And, whew… do we have one for you! In the Spring of 2024, when the weather was magnificent and our team explored St. Augustine on our annual team build, our creative, marketing, and advertising agency celebrated the start of our newest client collaboration!
Back in December 2023, our agency won a year-long RFP to collaborate with Tampa, Florida’s Marriott Water Street Hospitality Collection for organic, paid, and influencer social media marketing and management. Our team was to focus on five of their concepts.
Those five included JW Marriott Tampa Water Street, Tampa Marriott Water Street, Anchor and Brine, Driftlight Steakhouse, and Six Tampa. After we secured our contract, they snuck another concept into the mix, taking us from the five concepts quoted to six total concepts – those little rascals! The sixth concept was for Beacon, their rooftop experience at the JW.
During our initial negotiation, we recognized the need for elevated content but understood that a commercial-style shoot would live outside of our monthly retainer due to the client’s budgetary constraints.
As we spoke to the client and tried to understand their additional outside project budgets, we collectively landed on dedicated quarterly commercial shoots to gather both photo and video assets that would be used on their social media platforms as more evergreen content within that quarter.
As we moved into onboarding our retained services, we also moved to pitching and planning our first quarterly social asset commercial shoot.
Initially, we were asked to go “big” to impress vital stakeholders. As such, we initially pitched a four-day commercial photo and video shoot with the five concepts we were retained to support, being covered–we even threw in the sixth concept!
Our initial pitch proved to be far too “big,” of a budget so the client decided to dial back only the budget, but as we so often see in our industry, regardless of the drastic decrease in budget, the client still expected the same output as the quoted four-day shoot.
While this is common in our industry and something we navigate quite well, it’s never great to decrease the budget but expect the same result. We do, however, like to over-deliver so what did we do? Let’s see, shall we?
As many of you know, at BKN Creative, we make good art, but we also make sh*t happen, and this shoot included both! And, if you’re in the production space, you know what all goes into a shoot of this magnitude.
We’ll just say this, we had two days, two video crews, one photo crew, our entire agency crew, eight actors, hair and makeup, and so many added locations that were outside of our original scope that it’ll make your head spin.
👏 10 hour days.
👏 First location.
👏 Next location.
👏 Wardrobe.
👏 Hair and Makeup.
👏 Wardrobe again.
👏 Pool Scene.
👏 Dog.
👏 No Sleep.
👏 No Fear.
Our Goal: To create compelling imagery and video assets to further market the client’s concepts via organic and paid social media. Basically, we wanted to create gorgeous digital assets to share on social media and leave people gooped, gagged and bewildered!
What did it take? A whole lot of meticulous planning, collaborative effort from our team, and a keen understanding of the client’s vision. We got our juices flowing with several war-room-style brainstorms, planned out different ideas and channeled our passion and expertise to deliver awe-inspiring visual content.
To bring our creative vision to life, we began with in-depth mood boards, detailed storyboards, wardrobe, props, and a multitude of references to set the tone and guide the narrative. But that’s not all!
Our shot lists were carefully curated for each crew to ensure that every crucial aspect was captured. To add to our pre-production efforts, we sought out and secured talent through our friends at Level Talent, secured crew, and fine-tuned the production schedule for maximum efficiency. We know… we are thorough AF! How do you think we create such amazing content!?
Our production style thrives on the diverse expertise and perspectives brought to the table by our talented teams and collaborators. From Dee and Christian’s video crews to Benny’s dedicated photography team and Marissa, our fabulous agency hair and makeup artist, we strive to always incorporate collaborative teams with a dynamic and inclusive range of skills, enriching the production process and enhancing the final outcome.
In addition, we were also working with eight actors (six adults and two children), our agency crew, the client on set, one dog, and a partridge in a pear tree. Not only that, we were working while also navigating concepts that were open to the public. It was awesome and stressful, but mostly awesome!
Now, what were those stressful challenges? Girl, it was a doozy. Let’s dig in.
This shoot in itself was a big challenge, which we knew. Remember the part where we went from a four-day shoot to a two-day shoot? Yeah, that one. We went into it knowing it would be challenging… But, that challenge was also VERY exciting! What’s life without a good challenge? Not only did we have our crew and schedule to organize and lead, we also had over 5 – 50 shots to obtain in each dedicated location. Wait, let’s math this out… There were 500 shots planned between two crews during 2 10-hour days. And, that was just our video assets…
As we described above, our video and photo shoot proved to be an intricate project, presenting us with a set of unique challenges that tested our flexibility and resourcefulness. But that didn’t stop us!
Remember in high school track when you were considering the hurdles as a focus? Then when you tried it you busted your knee then tumbled to the ground embarrassed and hoping no one saw? But like, everyone saw? So you brushed it off, laughed, and continued on? That was us, but in all the right ways! So, let’s see how we faced the hurdles.
An unexpected shift in the client’s personal schedule meant we had to re-secure all crews at short notice. This threw a MAJOR wrench in pre-production, but thanks to our crew’s flexibility and our owners, who changed their personal time off to accommodate the only available date for the client, we managed to keep the same talented individuals on board.
Juggling two sets and a floating photographer to maximize our shooting schedule within the compressed timeframe posed its own set of logistical challenges. It required real-time problem-solving to keep everything running smoothly. Although it’s common to run overtime on shoot days, we not only managed to stay pretty much on time, with a few extended locations, we actually ended up wrapping each day on time as well!
One of the more significant obstacles came from the expectation, regardless of budget, to compress what was initially proposed as a four-day shoot into just two days. We said it earlier, but this was a significant challenge and one we attempted to push back on, for obvious reasons, but were met with resistance. We persevered but this did require a huge effort in pre-production and execution to meet the deliverables we needed. We were forced to pack all of the concepts into two 10-hour days to ensure we got all of the locations and had the right lighting to get certain outlets at sunrise and sunset. It was go go go, but we managed! But like, we’ll reconsider that one for our next shoot! Meaning, we will stick to our guns on what is fair for both the client and the agency.
To save costs on talent, as the client did not want to pay talent a high wage (we’ll save that for another day), the client committed to providing additional extras and staff to enrich the scenes, but unfortunately, that did not happen. For our shots, we were to have extras provided by the client in the background to set the scene and avoid empty concepts. Since the client did not provide these as promised, we had to be creative with our shooting to overcome this. We leveraged our crew and agency staff to fill spaces and even had an intern stand-in as a host of one concept. Talk about being resourceful! Additionally, with low client talent budgets, we had to utilize the same talent for multiple concepts, which was also not ideal. Our original suggestion was to have different people for each concept to avoid the repetitiveness of the same talent while keeping it fresh for audiences.
Shooting in a live environment meant minimizing the impact on guests, which meant having to carefully overcome last-minute operational tweaks and adaptations to shoot schedules to be mindful of guests.
and some others we won’t mention–but trust, they were ROUGH–our team’s dedication to creative problem-solving, stamina when presented with challenging client personalities, and incredible focus on our goals allowed us to successfully run this shoot.
Our overall experience underscores the importance of flexibility, clear communication, collaboration, and teamwork in overcoming unexpected obstacles and achieving success in a high-stakes, time-sensitive environment.
GO BKN! GO TEAM!
Over the course of two action-packed 10-hour days, our team and crew worked tirelessly to capture a comprehensive range of video footage and photos that fully represent the dynamic and luxurious essence of Tampa Marriott Water Street, JW Marriott Water Street and its associated outlets. Not only did we successfully capture over 49 locations, we also walked away with hundreds of video clips and photos to leverage over the coming months.
The overall success of this shoot when married with the challenges is a true testament to our team’s ability to leverage limited resources, work through low budgets and high expectations, and overcome unforeseen obstacles along the way. We fu*king killed this shoot. WERK!
Take a quick look at what we achieved!
Are you ready to elevate your commercial video and photo production? We’d love to collaborate. Say hello! We would love to hear from ya!
