Commercial

HELP-US-HELP-YOU

NHS Wales

… Our brief was to convey each of the many ways to do this in 30 short seconds.

We worked with Cardiff-based marketing communications agency, Golley Slater, to produce a TV commercial that combined live action and CGI. We also drafted in Welsh-born London-based Director Ewan Jones Morris, who brought a decade worth of CGI, animation and live action knowledge to the team. Completing the dream-team was our go to (and self-proclaimed) CGI Nerd, Stephen Thomas.

The giant floating arrows in the video point our characters to all the different places they can access the NHS. As with all things animation & CGI, these needed to sit seamlessly in our frames or the concept would fall apart. So while we, Golley and Ewan sent storyboards and designs back and forth, Stephen worked on creating a test model of the arrow.

With six setups to be shot over two days, this shoot needed to run like a well-oiled machine: distances between locations had to be short. Luckily, being a Cardiff-based video production company allows us to tap into the Cardiff Council’s very helpful film team who assisted us in finding affordable and easily accessible locations.

Due to the nature of this particular project, post-production became a back and forth process between our editor and Stephen as the arrows were worked into place. This could have been a complicated and time consuming process, but Stephen was able to send files over that could be swiftly slotted into DaVinci Resolve, from where we applied the finishing touches to make the arrows sit seamlessly within the environment.

 

Belong-to-Something

University of South Wales

The brief for the 2023 University of South Wales TV commercial centred around a handful of alumni sharing advice and stories from their time at university. The target audience, primarily Gen-Z, were identified as being more switched-on and savvy than ever, so the idea for this commercial was to convey a sense of honesty and authenticity.

As our video production company is made up of a majority of USW alumni, we could relate to what USW wanted to achieve and could see what positive impacts this campaign could have for the University, Cardiff and South Wales.

We wanted to make it clear that USW gives students the tools they need to break into their chosen industry, while at the same time not laying the sales pitch thick. We had to tread carefully to ensure we struck the right balance.

“On Par delivered an outstanding TV ad, it has had an overwhelmingly positive response. Their communication, attention to detail and management of the project meant the ad was delivered well within deadline, and to budget.” – Sophie Partridge, Campaign Planning and Brand Manager at USW

Building on the open and honest ideals of the brief, our proposal was to shoot the interviews from an almost behind-the-scenes perspective where microphones, lights and the edges of backdrops would all be in frame and the “inner workings” of the commercial itself would be on show, to add to the authenticity.

For this to feel real while still functioning as a TV commercial, we worked with the contributors to create a script of boiled down answers, rather than feeding them lines.

All of this combined enabled us to create a TV Commercial that answered the client’s brief and more. In addition to the 30 and 60 second commercials, we produced a number of longer web and social media films focused on each of the featured alumni. A series of photographs were also taken which, combined with quotes from the interviews, have been used in an Out Of Home bilingual campaign.

With On Par leading on all creative, production and delivery elements, this campaign became a great opportunity for us to run our first Carbon Neutral production, calculated through and certified by AdGreen – something we will be doing for all commercials moving forward.

We also felt strongly about involving current USW students in the commercial’s production, creating eleven trainee positions for students to shadow the crew members. Check out this BTS film, shot by the students, to see how they got on.

CLOGAU

Clogau

This is what our producers were asking themselves after S3 Advertising asked us to create Clogau’s Valentine’s Day TV Commercial.

The film would feature the Clogau family, which included Welsh presenter Gethin Jones and the tree would play a vital role too with the campaign based around Clogau’s Tree of Life collection. It needed to be big and have character.

However, you tend to only have evergreens in the Cardiff and South Wales area during winter, which scream Christmas… not quite what our client, nor we as a video production company want for a Valentine’s Day TV Commercial!

Time was running out on finding the ideal location, and bringing in a tree seemed expensive and far too complicated, so we decided the strongest option would be to add a CGI Tree in Post. This allowed us to use any tree wanted, dialling in on the foliage, bark, size, with, branches – etc.

“Amazing work on the commercial, looks beautiful!” – S3 Advertising

After shooting tests and integrating a reference tree, we decided on an Oak tree to symbolise longevity, strength, stability and endurance amongst other positive things – all symbolic details that helped to bring our family even closer together. During the shoot, stands with tennis balls became our tree stand-in, the director explaining to the cast and crew about how this would look in the final stages.

Work began in earnest once we got to the edit. Working with self proclaimed CGI Nerd, Stephen Thomas, we fine tuned the tree’s design and the way it sat within the scene. It had to look real and seamless – anything else and the concept would fall in on itself. As you can imagine, our director had a few sleepless nights – but it all came together in the end.

A strong performance from the Clogau family, Stephen’s CGI abilities and a fitting colour grade came together to create an emotive film that both agency and client were very happy with.

WGSHELTER

Welsh Government

We were asked to produce two 30 second TV commercials and campaign photography for a joint project between Shelter Cymru and the Welsh Government. Cardiff and Bristol-based advertising agency SBW came to us with two concepts highlighting how someone could easily find themselves homeless and how they could reach out to Shelter Cymru for help. The commercials were to have a documentary feel to heighten the sense of realism.

The two commercials feature characters who, after becoming homeless, seek help from Shelter Cymru. Alan’s Story features a man who lost his home after being made redundant. Sarah’s Story features a woman and her daughter who became homeless after suffering domestic abuse. The storyboard showed the pair moving from house to house after Sarah was bombarded with abusive text messages from her partner. The idea was to then rewind to an earlier point in the video and story, ‘intervening’ before things went too far downhill for Sarah. At this point she calls Shelter Cymru instead of letting her housing situation get out of hand and the pair move into a new home.

We shot everything handheld to help add to the documentary feel and used multiple locations to give a sense that Sarah was constantly moving around. We loved SBW’s storyboard, but our first challenge was to think of a way to show the film rewinding without being cheesy – queue Benny Hill music. So we tweaked the storyboard to include specific scenes that would look good once playing backwards and that would make it clear that the film was rewinding. One of these scenes involved Sarah getting upset and shedding a single tear, which would then roll back up her cheek in reverse – easier said than done!

Help-01
Help-02

With this scene we learned that shedding a single, movie-worthy tear is a big ask for an actor. Fortunately, our hair and makeup artist was able to source eye drops that did most of the hard work, but the challenge then was to get the perfect tear – not a raging torrent, but something big enough – and at the right speed. For such a short scene, it took a while to get right, but it was worth the effort – it worked perfectly, in both directions.

As this was a bilingual campaign, we made two versions of each commercial: one in Welsh and one in English. Overall we feel the commercials are emotionally impactful and do what we set out to do. SBW, Shelter Cymru and the Welsh Government were all happy with the results.

Please also check out Alan’s Story, the other film in this series.

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Welsh Government

March 21st 2022 was a historic moment for children and their rights in Wales; from that Monday on, punishing children physically was made illegal. Our task was to inform the nation of this change in the law.

The client was keen for the campaign to be a positive one, rather than getting lost in the serious tone of the issue. We worked with SBW, Cardiff and Bristol-based Advertising Agency, to create two TV commercials. One would be released prior to the law change, the second after.

Check out the pre law-change video below.

Both videos were shot over the course of a week. We cast a diverse group of families to help reflect the Welsh nation. Though most of the shooting was kept to Cardiff due to time constraints, one scene found us on the beautiful beach of Barmouth in North Wales, and most of our other locations were intentionally cast to be non-specific in terms of location.

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Photographer, Tom Farmer, joined us throughout the production, shooting the accompanying photography for an out of home campaign.

The campaign was a success, winning a Bronze Medal at The Drum Roses Creative Awards.

HIDDEN HOMELESSNESS

Shelter Cymru

We worked with marketing and advertising agency SBW, for Shelter Cymru’s #hiddenhomelessness campaign to help raise awareness of young people sofa surfing, and encourage them to reach out and get help.

The film needed to be pacey and believable with a clear, strong story that would connect with the target audience of 16-24 year olds. We created a Welsh / English bilingual TV Commercial that places the viewer in the shoes of someone who is hidden homeless, which  was specifically achieved by shooting in a POV style… we needed some serious kit to pull it off.

The film was shown on TV with lots of targeting done through Sky Adsmart, S4C and All4 – and the advert ended up winning a Drum Roses Creative Award!

As part of the campaign we also created a series of short documentaries – emotive case studies – that tell the stories of real people’s experiences of being hidden homeless. These films were used across social media as part of the online campaign reach.

A bilingual Spotify ad was also produced, using voiceover from the TV Commercial. The width and breadth of content produced was made possible by the talents of our in-house team, who make it possible for us to provide full video production services.

The campaign delivered some exciting, tangible results – not only meeting the SMART objectives, but surpassing them:

  • Nearly 60,000 visits to the campaign website (against the target of 50,000 visitors)
  •  3,195 conversions (320% result against the 1,000 goal)
  • 3 million overall impressions from the search and display ads alone (2.8 million of which fell within the 18-24 target audience)
  • The social media strategy delivered just over 5 million impressions, reaching nearly 1.9 million people between 1st January and 24th March