Raising the bar

The Trafalgar St. James is a Hilton Hotel in the centre of Trafalgar Square in London. We were approached by the hotel marketing team to produce a three deliverables. The first, a series of social media focussed videos to promote the opening of their rooftop bar's new Northern Lights theme, the second, the re-opening of their ground floor bar after COVID by creating a 'behind the menu' video set, and the third; an animated video in the jungle theme of their ground floor bar.

The challenges for the project were varied as the deliverables each presented different needs. To us, the main challenge was working around the availability that the Trafalgar St. James had. Due to the scope of the project, we didn't have exclusive access to the site and so we had to work around customers and staff.

To deliver on the briefs, we meticulously planned out 3 shoot dates both on and off site. It took one evening shoot to film parts 1 & 2 of the 3 part rooftop promo. The second shoot was on-site and we managed to film 10 setups within an 8-hour day to show the full 'behind-the-menu' video set. The third shoot was an evening shoot again and was for the final rooftop promo, working with 5 talents around a busy and serving bar. 

Asset Creation

Although all the deliverables required asset creation, the majority were created for the animation project, where we were working with pre-created 2D Jpg images and animating them. This involved heavy reworking in Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects but the end product was something the client loved.

On the Day

The shoot days were great fun and we were able to meet staff and colleagues of all levels at the hotel, filming in the kitchens, behind the bar and off-site at locations around London. This was a challenge but was made much more achievable due to the pre-planning of our producers who were able to juggle timelines, individual requirements and public filming laws to create shoot schedules that were efficient.

Video Creation

With social media being the predominant output for all of the content we were creating we shot a lot of content natively in a 9:16 orientation. In order to achieve this we mounted cheese plates to the side of the camera, allowing us to mount it securely in this manner to the rigging equipment. We shot a mixture of high frame rates and 25 fps to allow us to make some creative edits in post to bring the content to life and capture the viewers eye. 

Improving Statistics

The full scope of the success of this project remains in confidentiality with the client, however, in a recent catchup with them we discovered that just one of the videos had generated an organic reach of 250k which was up to 100 times the normal organic reach of their normal posts.

As a result of our involvement on this project, the Trafalgar St. James was able to generate engagement with their bar re-opening, new menu and themed bar launch online. The content was on-brand, professional and answered the brief that was given. With the likelihood of new projects with the hotel upcoming, we believe that the client was happy with our work.

Jamie Childs

Director of Marketing - Trafalgar St. James

I would highly recommend using Tower View Media for content creation. From the start of the process through to the end, the team's level of detail and preparation was seamless.