Behind the scenes of our Christmas Advert PART 1

Each year we at LIAV have sat and been enamoured by each supermarket and brands Christmas film offerings. The way in which they’re shot, the emotions they stir and the stories they tell. It’s an absolute bucket list dream of ours to one day be the team involved with creating a national Christmas advert and rather than sit wishing, we found ourself with a last minute window of time to get our act together and shoot a ‘spec’ Christmas ad. My spec ad, essentially its a proof of concept project - it’s proof that we have the capability to shoot the types of productions that we aim to do in the future.

We had a few things against us on this one. Firstly time - time to prep and time to shoot. We pretty had just a week and a half to think of a concept, bring it to production then deliver in time for Dec 1st. The next challenge was to utilise a limited budget and our fair extensive connections to see if we could put this ambitious piece together. Connections such as High- G flight school in Blackpool for the plane portion - a company we had shot with a few weeks prior. Nova Fine art - a local gallery in our office home town. My parents living room for the Santa end scene (one which with a few mince pies as a persuasion tactic, was one of the easier locations to secure. All these added up to greatly reducing the potentially vast budget we may have needed.

It was a useful exercise. One we learned greatly from - in terms of potential timed we would have preferred in certain scenes, the over ambitious set dressing and lighting set ups we had to do back to back etc, but overall we came away proud with what we had produced - especially in a week and a half.

Below is part 1, or day 1 of 3 in production. You join us at Blackpool Hangar 2.

Full Christmas film below!