With the recent announcement that restaurants are allowed to re-open their establishments and start serving customers in-house and on their patios, there were a lot of questions on what that would look like for customers and staff at the restaurants.
As there was uncertainty with the provincial announcement as to what reopening would entail, JOEY Restaurants approached us to produce a video with them that would give a clear visual representation of what procedures would be in place. The challenge came with the timeline.
We needed to go on location, film processes that were not currently in place, with safety equipment that had yet to be installed and deliver a completed project, all within 72 hours of signing the deal.
This was not our first project with the team at JOEY. We have worked with them on recruitment videos (pre-COVID) so we had already established a working relationship and rhythm. For this project, it was essentially going down a checklist of the safety precautions that have been put in place. The planned location was the newly opened JOEY Shipyards located at Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver. It’s a beautiful location that would allow us to shoot 360 degrees no problem.
We wanted to have it feel like you were experiencing it the way a customer would walk through the restaurant. We opted to shoot primarily on a gimbal, to allow the fluid camera motion. To capture close-ups, we would shift to our Red Epic with our 85mm and 135mm Canon Cinema Prime lenses to maintain a safe distance while shooting. As well, we kept our crew minimal with a 2 person team (wearing masks and gloves), and limited the amount of gear we were bringing in to allow us to move through our setups without a lot of teardowns.
We’ve often been in situations where we have to think on our feet and make decisions as we are shooting. Decisions that are not only best for the client but also best for our team when editing. Sometimes you only get one crack at getting the shot, and if you miss it, it’s gone. So the tight timeline was definitely not a problem.
Having the opportunity to work with the team at JOEY to produce video content that will help their business is something that we thoroughly enjoy and a primary reason we are in business. We often find ourselves talking with clients on the importance of integrating video into their overall marketing strategy, so when a client like JOEY Restaurant comes to us with a video idea that they want to be executed, we leap at the opportunity.