Play Now has been a recurring campaign, this is the third year Paragon Pictures has shot this project for Yamaha Music Europe. This year, they asked me to direct the three films. I produced and directed the campaign.
This year we shot in a location house again, we shot the Pacifica electric guitar, the P225 digital piano and an EKB keyboard product.
These are social media adverts to run as part of an informal ‘back to school’ campaign. They mainly target parents of the musician or a young adult re-starter. It is important that the adverts catch your attention immediately as they need to stop the scroll.
A big constraint on these adverts is that they need to be really short. Ideally 20 seconds (although a lot of the films over the last few years have ended up more like 30 seconds!)
To make these films as interesting as possible, a lot of focus has been on the treatment and techniques used in the shoot.
The brief came from Yamaha in February, with a creative meeting later that month to settle cast and locations. We shot over three days, 6 to 8 May, at a location house in Whittle-le-Woods in Lancashire, with photography running alongside the films so Yamaha got both from the same set-ups. Pianospeed delivered the instruments and collected them on the last afternoon.
Our contact in Yamaha’s German office was signed off sick the week of the shoot and couldn’t fly in. So we ran him a live camera feed and the photographer’s Capture One session, and a WhatsApp group did the rest. Luke Juby wrote the music for all three films and added a little foley where the picture needed it.
Yamaha signed the edits off on 20 July. In August we cut a version for the screen in their London store.
