Enjoy England's View From Above Posted At PFL

A new commercial for VisitEngland featuring spectacular aerial snaps of some of England's top attractions has been post produced at Prime Focus London.
The COI, who made the commercial with CST Advertising, tasked renowned location photographer Richard Cooke with capturing just some of the fantastic outdoor leisure activities and sights that England has to offer. The spot aired on May 18.
With a theme of Enjoy Every Minute; Enjoy England, the commercial consists of nine vignettes featuring different scenes and activities from around the country, and labelling them with a range of timeframes from two minutes to a weekend. The shots, which were taken by Richard Cooke on a digital SLR camera from a helicopter, are linked together to form a narrative.
Scenes include a relaxing balloon ride over a picturesque landscape on a summers evening, and a trip to the seaside for a fantastic weekend break. The commercial finishes with the famous Bath Circus, a ring of fine Georgian townhouses, morphing into a clock on the Enjoy England logo as the minutes tick by.
PFL's Creative Director, Derek Moore, was responsible for the online on the project. He said: "Turning a series of stills, taken from the air, into what looks like a roughly locked off shot was tricky. On one section, there were two frames of the rollercoaster just roughly in the right position, so we needed to make a clean plate and introduce fake movement and animation. Then we chopped it up into stills and did the dissolves between it."
Derek continued: "We were lucky to be doing this in Smoke as the speed and the nature of the movement dissolves between each frame. It took a lot of experimentation to get the movement feeling the way we wanted it. The whole thing became a fluid dissolve between each shot while other dissolves were going on. The whole multiple timeline became essential to developing the flow of the narrative."
Vic Parker graded the project at PFL and was delighted to work on such an interesting, visual project. He said: "They made a great choice in using Richard Cooke to shoot the photos. He produces stunning aerial photography which has a wonderful rich and vivid look. My aim was to keep that look by giving the images a strong bold feel that would make a great statement for the piece. I wanted to make sure the images stayed separate so essentially I was tweaking them together, but making sure they had their own identity."
VisitEngland is the official tourism body for England. Its role is to work in partnership with government and industry to create a national tourism strategy, helping to optimise marketing investment and developing the visitor experience across England. Enjoy England is the consumer-facing brand used in the domestic market.
(KMcA)