CASE STUDY
SANCTUARY COVE
The Challenge
Our client, Sanctuary Cove, approached us to try and quash the perception “that the community was just a place for people looking to enjoy their retirement and a place to spend their golden years”. When in fact, Sanctuary Cove is home to people from all walks of life, who love the boutique, vibrant, village lifestyle. We knew we were up to the challenge and we set out to effectively encapsulate that message in a video campaign.
The Approach
There are many ways to skin a cat. Should the video have a sentimental/emotional/artistic tone or more light-hearted and fun? Should we use voice over or interviews to tell the story? Their previous campaign was hosted by a minor celebrity, so they were also open to that as an option.
After brainstorming with our writers, we came up with the concept of following 4 different Sanctuary Cove residents through a day in their life. Each resident represented our client’s targeted demographic: A young couple, a young family, an elderly couple and a couple who run a small business (restaurant) at Sanctuary Cove. Our client loved the idea so we began our process of planning and development or “pre-production”.
Pre-Production Casting
One of the first elements to lock down was casting, who were these people going to be? Were they going to be actual residents or paid actors?
Depending on budget there are a number of options we can utilize.
If the video is a corporate video giving an overview of a company, we always recommend using the actual people that work in the business. This is by far the most authentic way of connecting with your audience, not to mention it’s cost effective!
Similarly for this campaign, as we were looking to target potential buyers, our first instinct was to use actual residents, providing a genuine look and authentic message. However due to conflicting schedules we couldn’t get the residents we had hoped for, so we needed to get some paid talent to play some of the roles of the residents.
This actually had a lot of positive aspects. For starters, as we were selecting from literally hundreds of actors we knew we had a good chance they would look good! In all seriousness, having attractive talent, especially for a lifestyle shoot is very important, it’s advertising 101. Also, even something as simple as a lifestyle shoot (eating food, enjoying leisure activities) does involve a certain level of experience from the talent. Getting paid talent can save valuable time on set because they know what you need and they usually know what looks good.
Do note, sometimes using internal staff can be a great way to save costs on casting. Usually there’s at least 1 or 2 budding movie stars in your ranks and some may even have experience in front of the camera.
After discussions with our client we ended up using a mixture of hired talent and some internal staff from Sanctuary Cove.
Locations
Another very important element is the locations. What are our featured talent going to be doing exactly? For the young couple, Sanctuary Cove happened to have a 2-day food and wine festival coming up, so we thought it would be a great opportunity to showcase the event. This was also important because it was a large setup providing scale and scope, this goes a long way in providing production value or making it look impressive.
We combined the festival with other scenes that highlight the Sanctuary Cove lifestyle, such as shopping and relaxing at the glorious man-made beach.
For the other featured “residents” some of the locations and activities we included were: a round of golf on the world class “The Pines” course, boating on the broadwater, tennis at the rec club, dinner at the award winning “Ioesco” restaurant and family time spent in a beautiful home.
Production
Every project varies in terms of shoot days, depending on how much content we need to cover and also how much budget our client has to work with. Many projects only require 1 day but others require more. For this project, we had a 3 day shoot to cover 14 locations, so roughly 4-5 locations per day. Usually we recommend only 3 locations per day but as the locations were all at Sanctuary Cove and quite close together we could fit in more.
Before every shoot we pray for great weather and our prayers were answered with beautiful blue skies for the duration of our shoot. Our first day started with our star makeup artist Vicky Sands working her magic by making one of our talent’s tattoos literally disappear! Admittedly she did have to use a few bottles of concealer;) But the end result was really amazing with no one realizing one of our main talents actually had full arm sleeve tattoos.
Post-Production
The rest of the shoot went great and we had some incredible footage to go into “post production” or the editing process. Once we had all the scenes cut together and our music in place, we got our voice over artists to send in their audio recordings. Voice overs are another area of specialisation and are surprisingly difficult to get right. So that’s why we sometimes use professional voice over artists to be the voice of the talent.
Response
Once we had all the elements in place, the day came when we got to show our client the video for the first time or the “first offline”. They were so happy one of them actually shed a tear! We thought that was a pretty good indication that the video had done its job.
The video was published on multiple platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Facebook plus displayed in their sales offices around the country. We heard first hand that the campaign was exceeding expectations and dramatically increased inbound traffic to their website and phone lines. Needless to say we were extremely happy we’d helped another client expand their reach and increase their sales.
Review
“Thanks to Bordertown Films for producing such an amazing video for us and stills photography. Blown away with the outcome….thank you 🙏” Gill Turner Office Manager, Sanctuary Cove
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