Written by on Jun 17, 2010. Posted in On Location

Global locations to catch the eye at Cannes Lions

Many advertising agencies have been defying the recession and continued sending crews out to exciting locations around the world to film their latest spots. Many of these will be showing at the Cannes Lions festival shortly. Ahead of our trip to the Croisette, here are three that we thought made great use of their location shoots.

Hippo: Baked Munchies filmed throughout Mumbai. It made impressive use of public locations as it showed the brand’s hippo character delivering order to chaos in the style of a first-person shooter video game. The production team built a mock-up interior of a government building in a classroom within the city’s Elphinstone Technical Institute, before destroying it during the shoot.

Manoj Shroff, a Producer with production company Equinox, said: “Mumbai is a great place to shoot. You just need to keep adequate time for permission and work with a good location team.”

Perhaps inevitably, the build-up to the Fifa World Cup in South Africa has resulted in many brilliantly creative commercials, not least from the likes of Visa and mobile operator Orange. Visa’s Football Evolution showed an overweight England fan celebrating his team’s goal by taking a transcontinental sprint from his living room to the stadium.

The shoot focussed on South Africa and involved long days for the crew. Ken McKenzie, of McKenzie Rudolphe Film Services, said: “One of the shoot days in Cape Town started at 4am, 50km out of Cape Town. We then travelled right across the peninsula, stopping to film the Tyre Shack sequence en route to Strand Beach where we filmed the ‘Costa del Sol’ sequence.”

We also enjoyed the Orange Airball commercial. This was striking both for its use of a crowded South African township near Pretoria and its innovative idea of an impromptu football match uniting the crowd with an imaginary football. Despite the chaotic feel of the crowd in the finished spot, the production hired hundreds of extras and the players themselves were carefully cast to represent the entire African continent.

Steve O’Leary, Creative Director at Publicis Conseil, said: “We were looking for a cosmopolitan feel, the coming and going of a market, a hub where people would congregate.”

These spots are of course just a small selection of what’s come out in recent months, but they show what you can do with some creative thinking and some eye-catching locations. See you in Cannes!