HerCanberra Brand Film: producing a short film in a pandemic

In 2020, HerCanberra commissioned the Newcast team to come up with an updated Brand Film concept for their company.

The HerCanberra and Newcast teams worked closely storyboarding and collaborating on ideas that would fit their brand.

Little did we know, that a pandemic was going to sweep Australia.

HerCanberra is already such a well-known and established online magazine and the main question we asked was how do we show people a new HerCanberra Brand Film without steering away from who they are — and how do we capture this through video?

We came up with three concepts.

The first centred around a Canberra local and a tourist’s ‘day in a life’, having them utilise the HerCanberra website as a ‘tell all’ on what to do in Canberra. That way we could show off the arts and culture Canberra has to offer from both the perspective of a local and a tourist, encompassing food, fashion, lifestyle, family and work.

Our second concept was around the ‘behind the scenes’ of HerCanberra showing off the hard work and the faces behind the brand, capturing moments of photoshoots, interviews and events.

Finally, the third concept followed a concept of where and how HerCanberra was created —  a visual representation of their history till now.

Concept 1 had been picked and we started scheduling the shoots. Unfortunately, by this stage Canberra had its first case of the COVID-19 in March 2020 and we were thrown into lockdown.

Fortunately, Canberra’s cases were under control in around 2 months and things were returning to ‘normal’, but with COVID restrictions still in place it was a large obstacle for us to come up with ideas on how we could start filming again.

We started by re-writing the story we were telling, still including the ‘day in a life’ theme, but instead of the storyline centred around two main characters, we steered towards different main character(s) for each scene. The reason for this is we could have each scene with a set family or friend group, and not have to introduce strangers to each other for every scene.

With this and making sure we had masks, hand sanitiser and using social distancing on set, the shoots could go ahead keeping everyone COVID-safe.

Shooting during a pandemic with all these elements in play meant the shoots where spread out all the way to August, when the final scenes were shot.

Heading into the edit suite, we wanted to convey HerCanberra’s ability for the consumer to see that they’re a great online space to find not only all the goodies in Canberra, but a place you can find yourself being proud to be a Canberran, by hearing all the new and fun things people are doing and are putting on within our Territory and showing off to the non-Canberrans out there that we are a great spot to visit.

We then came up with the idea of including a search bar with complementary key messaging to the sequence. For example, ‘local exhibitions’ and in this sequence, we have two sisters looking at the local art that was being exhibited in New Acton.

The final hurdle was trying to fit everything into a 30 second ad space!

Once edits were signed off, the final touches were added such as colour grading — we wanted to create a colour grade that mixed in well with the HerCanberra brand, colours that were light and somewhat feminine, wanting to create happy emotions through the colours we chose. A final sound mix was done to get the ad ready to play in the cinema and on social media.

The year 2020 was a strange one for everyone and making a promo during this time had been challenging, but to have the time and capacity to produce such a neat video, and see how people can adapt to make things work, made this project come together.

See the full video below, and work with us today.