How We Made ‘Everyday Sewper Heroes’ Come To Life For Thames Water

06th March 2020 by CH

CH Video officially hit the silver screen this year with not just one, but two television adverts for Thames Water’s latest campaign ‘ Be an everyday Sewper hero’.

The Brief
We’ve been working with Thames Water for many years now and as a trusted video partner, we were able to suggest a great response to their brief.
For authentic scenarios and footage that’d be relatable for any viewers, we went for a self-shot style for a fun and informal approach, capturing people filming themselves (but we actually filmed this professionally).

To create a multi-platform production like this, we knew that pre-production and planning was going to be key.
We worked up several different scripts of varying lengths to allow for social media cut downs, radio edits and approval from Clearcast and Radio Centre before we even got into production. The paperwork in our binder was already filling up (only joking, but our digital files and folders were enormous).

We also held several casting sessions, enlisted an art director and storyboarded the three scenarios to know the exact shots we needed to get on the day.

The content

Over the course of just a few weeks – we planned, filmed, edited and delivered three different videos, two of them were rotated on Sky, ITV, Channel 4 and Spotify and amongst others. To ensure the content worked harder for Thames, we re-versioned the footage into shorter, cut down edits to share on social, along with photography assets. The other two videos were also shared on social and broadcast on regional TV and as radio ads.

Watch here

Filming in this style meant hiding the camera work to create the illusion of footage being self-filmed, concealing microphones in clothing and positioning lights strategically within the set. Not exactly your everyday snapchat video!

Did we mention we were also filming with a baby? To ensure we ‘got the shot’, we had another baby waiting in the wings, ready to jump in if the one we were filming needed a snack or a nap. Which reminds us of our shoot with dogs last Christmas… Read more about that here.

For broadcast, an extra-long list has to be addressed in the post-production stage including all manner of visual tweaks to ensure the brightness and colour are ‘legal’. Sound also has to be put through the mill, ensuring it’s also the correct volume for delivery.

Liaising with the various agencies involved for TV and radio placement is critical. If you accidentally add a wrong code to the video the auto-scheduled broadcast playout computers will just run it!

It was brilliant to see our content in so many places and see our vision come to life.

As always, Thames Water were very happy with the results and their campaign was a success.

Get in touch with us at hello@ch-video.com to chat through your next video project – whether that’s content for internal purposes, external use, social or broadcast. We’d love to get our teeth into it.