When Eden Project contacted me to see if I was interested in directing a video for them I could hardly contain my excitement. The pitch they gave me was a spoof fragrance commercial advertising a fake perfume created from the stench of the Titan Arum or ‘Corpse Flower’ which smells of rotting flesh.
Immediately I had ideas and visions of how it might look whirring around my brain and I managed to convince them that I was the man for the job.
Roll forward about 3 weeks and today the campaign (and film) was launched to the public and press. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind getting this project completed with some tight timescales and deadlines.
Firstly the 2 actors were flown down from London for 1 day only to do the filming and PR photos which gave us a bit of a headache – obviously we couldn’t film whilst the biomes were open to the public as we wanted a closed set to create a jungle-like environment. This meant that we had to film after closing time which would have been fine on a sunny, clear day in June but unfortunately it was dull and cloudy, meaning that we only had a limited time of about 3 hours to complete the filming before it was too dark to shoot. We also had to fit in the recording of the voice-over with Ella, which we ended up doing in my car in a corner of one of Eden’s furtherest carparks which must have been a sight for any passers by!
We also had to contend with the humidity inside the biomes which meant arriving well early to get my lenses used to the conditions so they wouldn’t steam up during the filming.
The shoot itself was fairly low-budget with just myself, the 2 actors and Tom Trinkle, the Digital Content Manager at Eden on hand to co-direct, but luckily we had developed a rough storyboard beforehand to work from. It was a real pleasure to work on this and although I was knackered and sweaty from running around a tropical rain forest with a Glidecam strapped to me I think we’ve created a nice little video.
