Vodafone Emphasizes That 'Together We're Powerful' in Lockdown Campaign

Vodafone are to hit TV screens with new campaign ad directed by Tom Wilson, Agent Elson. Wilson, is represented in the UK by Agent Elson. The creative talent and PR consultancy, shared an insight into the making of the advert.

"The limitations of this shoot were clear when we took the job on – we had to create something under lockdown conditions, without putting anyone in danger, in record time. There were two ways of doing this: call up our DOP and photographer friends to produce professional-looking content we could rely on, or use footage generated by regular people using laptops and mobile phones."

We decided to mostly depend on regular people – we loved the idea of the “user-generated” look which we could pep-up in the edit with a few shots from cinematographer friends. Right from the beginning we wanted something authentic-looking, rather than staged and perfect. This crisis has been a really difficult time, and we wanted to depict it in a way that feels unmediated and genuine. This meant embracing the experimental nature of the shoot and all of the “unknowns” that come into play when you’re getting people with zero filming experience to generate content."

The project was completed in one week - from approval to final edit - which informed the decision that the best approach would be to utilise as much “user-generated” content as possible, as fast as possible. Three directors worked together on this shoot: Tom Wilson, Anton Groves and Damian Groves.

"We’ve been friends for years, so we could be totally honest about each others’ ideas. We had a huge amount to shoot and we divided up the workload between us. Even though we wanted footage shot by ordinary people, we still did lots of direction. I ended up getting people to rearrange their living rooms for the camera! Because time was so tight we didn’t do a conventional casting – instead we directed the talent’s casting videos and used this in the edit. The advantage of this was the potential for loads of material. The disadvantage was that not everyone we shot with would have normally made it through the casting stage."

Wilson continued: "Directing over WhatsApp or FaceTime sounded pretty undemanding. But it wasn’t. We were working non-stop, directing people, giving feedback, and doing lots of group director chats to iron out problems. Directing remotely is a strange experience, it’s incredibly frustrating to not be able to actually be there and I think we all realised that being as patient and understanding as possible was critical. Shooting gave us an insight into how people are coping during the lockdown. We were invited (albeit virtually) into lots of people’s houses, and got to spend time with a wide range of people from all over Romania. So in a way the directing experience reinforced the message of the TVC – it was really a kind of “virtual coming together”.