V Festival
Client
Virgin Media
Industry
Telco
Category
Sponsorship, campaign, social, film
The hardest productions to lead are the ones where you cannot be in the room, or in this case, on the field. This was a national music festival, filmed by a crew I was not standing next to and edited against the clock, and it still had to look like we had been there all along.
V Festival was one of the biggest dates in the British music calendar from 1996 until it wound down in 2017. In August 2020, with live events gone and the country starved of the big shared experiences it used to take for granted, Virgin Media brought it back for one weekend as a treat for customers after a grim few months. Filmed in the days beforehand and aired across the weekend on ITV2, it was a festival you watched from your sofa, and I led the creative content.
Almost none of the production was in my hands. Restrictions capped the number of people allowed on site, so we could not be there. The footage we needed would be captured by an on-site crew and a production company we were relying on completely, and once the shoot wrapped, there was very little time to edit before everything had to be live alongside the broadcast. Get the brief slightly wrong and there would be no second take.
So, I built the control in before a camera rolled. I led an extensive pre-production process and wrote what was effectively a production bible: interview questions in priority order, the specific brand angle each one needed to hit, scripts for every channel, shot lists, b-roll requests and storyboards for the lot. The principle was to work backwards from the finished films, so the crew on the ground captured exactly what the edit would need and nothing was left to a conversation I could not have in person. I had the graphics and storyboards signed off before filming began, which meant that the moment the footage landed, we could cut straight to a plan everyone had already approved.
On the ground, Big Zuu was our interviewer, briefed tightly to get what we needed from a lineup that ran from Olly Murs and Anne-Marie to then-rising names like Maisie Peters and Mae Muller. We staged the interviews to feel as though they happened just before each artist walked out to perform, which gave customers a genuine access-all-areas feel. Around the films, we built an online destination for the weekend, with behind-the-scenes previews and a chance to win festival boxes so people could have their own version of the festival at home.
It also had to work everywhere at once. I wove in more social-led questions for the other channels and planned the filming so the footage held up across multiple screen formats, which social distancing made trickier than usual. Because the graphics and storyboards were locked before the shoot and everything was filmed to them, we turned around three films plus social cut-downs fast enough to land in time for the festival weekend.
What we delivered:
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A dormant national festival brought back for one weekend, with content live alongside its ITV2 broadcast
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Three films plus social cut-downs, shot remotely and edited at speed
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Big Zuu interviews with artists from Olly Murs and Anne-Marie to Maisie Peters and Mae Muller
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An online destination with behind-the-scenes previews and at-home festival-box giveaways
What it shows: owning a complex, multi-channel production from a distance – building enough planning and creative direction into the brief to control the outcome even when the shoot itself was out of my hands.
