Four films that had to match

Camana Bay is Dart's. The town centre, the offices, the waterfront and the neighbourhoods around it. Four films covering the whole of it, shot over two weeks.

The split was their idea

We worked in collaboration with Not Your Standard, and the four-way structure came from them.

One hero film carrying the whole place, then three more aimed at three different reasons to care about it. The businesses operating out of the town centre. The people living in the neighbourhoods around it. The visitors who come for a day.

I want to be clear that the thinking was theirs, because it was good thinking. Camana Bay has a problem most destinations do not have: it is a working town centre, a residential district and a visitor attraction at the same time, and those three audiences want to hear completely different things. One film trying to speak to all three ends up speaking to none of them. Four films, with one holding the set together, solves it.

Our job was to shoot it so that the four read as one campaign rather than four jobs that happened to share a client.

The hardest part was the diary

Two weeks was the window, which is less than it sounds when you are making four finished films.

The constraint was not the light and it was not the locations. It was talent.

Four films across a fortnight means real people on camera across a fortnight, and people have jobs, holidays and days they simply cannot do. Anyone appearing in more than one setting has to be free when the schedule says so, and the moment one person moves, every scene around them moves with them. A two week schedule looks generous on paper and then spends itself on the availability of about a dozen diaries.

Then there is the other kind of continuity. Four films shot over fourteen different days have to look like one campaign by the time they are cut. The grade, the lensing and the pace have to hold across days that did not resemble each other, in a town centre that changes character between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon. That is a decision you make on the first day and then keep making, quietly, every time the weather or the schedule tries to talk you out of it.

None of that is glamorous and none of it shows up on screen, which is rather the point. If the seams are invisible then the schedule worked.