I’ve recently become fascinated with different people’s creative process and been finding a lot of inspiration from podcasts including Song Exploder and Spark and Fire which leads me to sharing some of some recent work that I was incredibly proud to have created alongside my team at Brunswick Creative for The Hong Kong Jockey Club.
The brief was to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Hong Kong, which on all fronts was potentially a complicated political and social minefield. We felt that the majority of Hong Kong brands would head for a generic “celebration film” and so we intentionally headed in a very different direction, looking back over the last 25 years of the club’s contact points with the average Hong Konger and wondering how we might draw on nostalgia to represent that extensive heritage on screen.
I came up with the idea of connecting these moments together through the narrative perspective of one individual, and decided it should be a female to come at the memories of the club from a different perspective to the stereotypical male racing fan. The club shared with us a list of significant moments from their history and I set to work crafting a story to link them all together.
Once we had a narrative and I had some key scenes in mind, with the help of my amazing editor/motion designer/animator/storyboard artists Joey Kan, we started to put them down on paper and figure out how we would transition between the moments.
From the storyboards, we then moved on to creating an animatic to help us with camera moves and transitions so we could plan shots, as well as figuring out timing to help with sound design, music and voiceover.
The filming of this campaign took place over three days and was definitely one of the most challenging yet rewarding shoots of my career! I may have been slightly over optimistic imagining that horses, babies and Hong Kong weather would all perform perfectly on cue, but the resulting footage was a testament to all our hard pre-production preparation work that no doubt enabled us to execute on a solid plan, as the storyboards and animatic are finally brought to life on screen.
I’m proud to say that the resulting campaign took home two Golds at the Transform Asia Awards!