A Lap of the World

This was a big one! It's been three whole weeks of none stop filming. We have filmed interviews in 11 different cities around the world, travelling over 25,000 miles in the process.

It all started around 7 weeks ago when we received the brief and not much time to turn this project around considering the scale of it. Suddenly we were faced with the logistical mountain of organising a filming schedule spanning across three continents with only a narrow window for execution. After many emails and phone calls, our itinerary eventually evolved into this back to back shooting schedule: Manchester to Dublin and then on to London, Paris, Heidelberg, Milan, Madrid, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Richmond and finally Seoul in South Korea. There were many moving parts to this, but in the end it all came together to form a well oiled machine and the client was overjoyed with the end results.

The European leg was done in two parts. We drove the first half from London to Paris and on to Heidelberg due to equipment requirements and then returned back to base. Next we flew to Dublin and onto Milan and Madrid. It's always nice to visit these cities as we have in the past, but on this occasion we had very little downtime to take any of it in.

After touching backdown in Manchester at 11pm from Madrid, we headed home for a quick sleep before returning to the airport to catch a flight to New York at 9am. Some much needed sleep was had on the journey to New York I tell you! We touched down in JFK and loaded the equipment into a rental car before driving south to Long Beach Island. The next morning we interviewed a patient who had overcome her battle with a very aggressive form of cancer to say the least. This was an inspirational story and a privilege be a part of. As soon as we wrapped the interview, it was time to load the kit back into the hire car and embark on a 800 mile road trip to Cincinnati, Ohio.

There's nothing quite like a road trip across the states, especially one that's 800 miles long. We did this drive in one go passing countless sights including the infamous "Strangle Motel", which as enticing as it sounded, wasn't our final destination thankfully. We arrived in Cincinnati late that night at our hotel and began prepping the kit ready for the morning shoot.

A lovely sunrise in Cincinnati and we were off to the shooting location at 8am. We spent half of the day filming in the clients office building where we were tasked to conduct a series of interviews and gather b-roll from a group of employees who had been involved in some charitable work to fight against breast cancer. After we wrapped filming, we headed for Papa John's to grab some editing fuel (many Pizzas..) and began to organise the footage that we had acquired over the last week. The next morning we jumped back in our trusty white Ford Escape, and hit the road heading for the Windy City.

As expected, Chicago was cold... Very, very, cold (and windy obviously). It was an easy drive from Cincinnati to Chicago, and we even managed to pop into Kentucky first for some genuine KFC (tick that one of the "bucket" list I guess?.... sorry). Anyway, when we woke up in Chicago ready for the first of our two shoots that day, we were treated to the lovely sunrise shown above. We had one shoot to do at the clients US Headquarters and then some more filming around their local manufacturing plant which was fun. Filming wrapped and we had one more night to spend in Chicago before jumping on a Christmas Eve plane back to the UK just in time for the festivities.

Well I use the term fesivities lightly; after a rather jet lagged Christmas Day I found myself powering down the M6 towards London Heathrow, early on Boxing Day. We boarded an afternoon 12 hour flight heading for Seoul, South Korea. Upon touching down, it became immediately clear that Chicago had been practically tropical in comparison with the icy chill that whipped around the streets of Seoul. It's not like I had my Hawaiian shirts packed or anything, but I wasn't quite prepared for just how cold Seoul would be at this time of year (FYI... Pack a thick coat if you ever go!).

The next morning we walked from the hotel to the clients office to go through the filming with their APAC team. We agreed to conduct the interview in a local buddhist temple in the middle of Seoul. This was an amazing day and I loved filming around the temple and gardens. It was such a peaceful and tranquil place despite it being located within a busy city. After filming we headed to a local Korean restaurant with our client where we were treated to some local dishes that were delicious (not entirely sure what it was though but nice all the same). Rather exhausted from all the travelling, we went back to the hotel, backed up the media and caught the plane back to London the following day. It's been a tremendous few weeks of filming and as always, it is always a pleasure to call this work!