Pre-Production
During this time, we sent over a number of drafts of the structure of the campaign, wanting to make sure that we worked within the client's budget, but also were highlighting their main consumer demographics. Once we landed on the three scenarios, we then set out to cast our 8 cast members.
In the past, we would lean on our industry contacts or utilise paid platforms that assist in searching for talent. But we realised that the next step for us as a company would be to blend these two ideas together and create our own casting platform that we can tap into for any and all campaigns. We wanted to pool talent in a concise way that would mean that whether or not a project we were working on required creators (UGC, Influencers), Actors or Models, we could tap into this resource and access them for our clients. Our web extraordinaire, George, put together a platform for us on our website and after running some ads, the applications started flooding in and we locked in our key talent.
The final stage of pre-production for Australian Spirit was that location; one of our scenarios required a live AFL match being attended at a stadium by thousands of fans. Given Jerky Co. was founded in Perth, we wanted to give a nod to them, but also highlight some other state teams where their audience are from. After looking at the upcoming AFL calendar, we found a game, Freemantle vs. GWS, that lined up perfectly with our deadline and production timeline.
Then came the construction site - we reached out to some Tradie mates and through friends of friends (of friends), we secured a location that was perfect! Suburban, quiet, yet had all the markers of an active construction site for our two actors to be ‘having their lunch break’ in front of.
The final location was a living room scenario, and thankfully one of our team members was happy for us to come over and shoot at their place!
Production
Ideally, we were hoping to have all three scenarios shot over two days. But we soon prioritised location availability over timing, and split them up over 3 separate days.
First up was our Stadium scenario, which (thankfully) was a beautiful day with lots of passionate fans in attendance. Our team were ready to rock once the actors showed up, and we nailed their performances relatively quickly. We made a point to capture some B-Roll footage of Stadium details, other fan traffic and our actors joining the crowd (as best we could without them requiring a ticket to enter the game), which always helps in the edit.
Next up was our Tradies scenario - This day required us to travel with our Tradie #1 to a The Jerky Co. kiosk in Bondi to capture his character ‘stocking up’ on Jerky he will share with his Tradie mate. We then moved our crew to our second location, the construction site in Killara, to capture multiple setups (both for social and landscape formats).
Our final day of shooting was the Living Room scenario. Given we had a little more control of this location than a public stadium and a construction site, we took our time getting as much coverage here as possible. This way, once we got in the edit, we could always know we had this scenario to land on and cut back to if ever we needed to fill out the timeline.
Post-Production
Once we landed in the edit, the footage and overall story came together very smoothly. It looked great and was exactly what was briefed to the client.
The challenge came when we began our sound mix; as briefed, the Australian anthem would take us from scenario to scenario, game footage to our characters. But given we were shooting at a very real stadium and a construction site, we didn’t want to rely on live audio recordings given we couldn’t control other sounds interfering with the quality. So we opted early on to ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement) the anthem ‘singing’ over our actors ‘miming’ on the day. This took a lot of fiddling around with; we needed multiple volumes, enthusiasm levels, mixed lyrics with humming over chewing jerky, etc.
Thankfully, we as a team pulled together and worked relentlessly to blend the real anthem sounds with our ADR so the final product feels authentic yet polished. A real feat!
Results
The Jerky Co. were really impressed with our final delivery for the Australian Spirit campaign and their audience has responded favourably as well. Something we’ve made note of is that the smart thing about this campaign is that it’s centered around both sport and the Australian anthem, meaning that essentially any sport can be green-screened into the scenes in order to fit upcoming championships or special event games on the calendar.
Delivering a campaign that can stand the test of time for a client and have a strong future to be re-used with a different context is a real feat, and we were thrilled to have been a part of it!
