We recently had an exciting opportunity, commissioned by Gecko Creative, to produce four promotional films for Abellio Group’s Stansted Express. Each video showed an entire customer journey, inbound and outbound in either first or second class.
The videos were to be aimed predominantly at international users of the train, so there was no speech or text involved in the main videos as it had to be understandable to everyone regardless of language. Everything needed to be shown clearly, and portray the high standard of the cabins and service that you would come to expect.
Filming in Stansted Airport and London Liverpool St presented a bit of a challenge, as they are both busy environments and on top of that we only had a very limited amount of time to film everything. (There’s always at least one helpful member of the public who decides it’s his duty to wave at the camera!) By using a tight-knit 4 person crew we were able to work at speed with minimal disruption, covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time.
Shooting everything from the point of view of a passenger was a bit of a tricky one to negotiate, and getting the correct angles involved some contortionism from both the cameraman and actor involved! A Red 4K camera was used to enable us to time-ramp certain elements during post-production, quickly conveying distances.
It was a long three days of filming but well worth it to see the end result, we’re proud to have made videos that clearly convey all the key points of the customer’s journey in beautiful HD.
And now as a follow up we’re currently producing a series of 6 x 30 seconds cut downs with on screen text in multiple languages for Facebook as drivers to the main Stansted Express website, and to play out on smaller monitors and ticket machines in the airport. Phew!