Every film producer knows that filming with animals or children is something to avoid. However, the advertising producer’s kryptonite is different: politicians and elite athletes.

Coordinating a shoot while juggling the schedules of politicians and first division teams, under the restrictions of Covid19 and in a record time of one week was a challenge, and at ICÒNIC, challenges are our speciality.

The Generalitat Valenciana wanted to carry out a pro-vaccination campaign aimed at the younger population before August, as there were many requests to postpone the injection of the second dose due to the holidays, which predicted a spike in infections.

The piece was conceived as a call for collective effort, as a similarity to the sporting culture of the clubs València CF, Villarreal CF, Elche CF, Levante UD and València Basket. In addition, having the most well-known faces of Valencian football and basketball was a perfect link with the young population.  We got the brief only a week before the final deadline. So… we had to run, literally.

How many players will we have? What days? How many hours? In the stadium? In the sports city? “Confirmed: we shoot Friday, Monday and Tuesday.” “There have been changes: we roll on Friday, Tuesday and Thursday.” “Emm… Could we shoot on Saturday?”, “Guys… Instead of Thursday, we have to shoot on Wednesday”… The difficulty was not adjusting the shooting to the changes in the schedule, but the collateral damage to the creativity and storyboards with each modification. 

Summarising, for this project, there were more changes in pre-production than in post-production, which is quite unprecedented, but pretty  fun.  Since we had practically one hour per team, the shoot went fast, which caused some cracks in the transitions between sequences. Incredibly enough, despite the constant changes in the call sheet, only 10 minutes per player and a few takes per scene, everything went smoothly.

On the other hand, if there is something positive about shooting with little time, it is that the selection of the material and the post-production are a boat ride, although… a very fast boat, since the delivery had to be done practically 24 hours after the end of the shooting.

In the end, with the exception of a few sunburnt faces, everything went well. The client congratulated the whole team, the infections went down drastically during the summer and we still had time to shoot hoops. It’s well known that in audiovisual production, the sky is the limit, and not even…