Celebrity Cruises: Take Me To The River
Overview
We had the opportunity to take part in a very exciting launch with our partners at Celebrity Cruises. Code-named “Project Frontier”, Celebrity had decided to enter the river cruising business, bringing the same modern luxury standard that they bring to the ocean space to Central European river cruises. Naturally, such an important announcement required high-end video content to match the moment, and we were brought in to drive the announcement forward and give it the kick it needed.
However, with boats still far away from hitting the water, we faced the challenge of selling the experience without the actual product. Thankfully, their vision for these vacations was destination-driven, and the brief was to capture excursion experiences from Vienna to Budapest that set the tone for all the marketing materials to follow.
Process
We worked with Celebrity to highlight three places to center our shoot around – Vienna, Austria, the Wachau Valley (also in Austria) and Budapest, Hungary. All three would be heavily featured in vacation itineraries, and each contained an Old Europe charm and beauty that we were eager to capture.
The project was a logistical tour-de-force, as we worked with local Austrian and Hungarian crews to scout locations and experiences that aligned with Celebrity’s vision for the vacations. Coordinating two such crews from across the planet presented obvious degree-of-difficulty implications. We wanted to shoot in major tourist locations like Schonnbrunn Palace and the Parliament building in Budapest. We needed to climb mountains to get into ancient castle ruins and locate a perfect little winding valley road to drive our vintage cars on. We shot everywhere from the Vienna Opera House to quaint cobblestone town streets.
From ancient historic bathhouses to traditional strudel cooking classes in the countryside, we traveled around Central Europe with our six talent, capturing bespoke b-roll in over twenty different locations, from land and from river, over two tightly scheduled weeks.
We also felt like we needed to bring our fastball to the game aesthetically, to help underscore the importance and gravity of the announcement. We continued the visual language we established in Nothing Comes Close, with its handheld movements, wide-angle lenses, occasional POV moments, and dynamic stills sequences, while adding a few wrinkles just for Frontier. We brought a 8mm film camera and captured some of our favorite moments in an authentic, retro-flavored home-video style that colored our scenes with just the right amount of romanticized nostalgia.
The project’s footage will be used to promote the experiences in endless edits and videos over the coming years, but we decided to create our own cut that brought together the best moments. We were even inspired to add in a little Al Green to create a funky little travelogue. We hope it’s as transportive and evocative as we intend. See below.
Results
This project produced an hourlong reel of color-graded b-roll for use in potentially hundreds of deliverables promoting the river cruise experience for Celebrity.
Brothership was responsible for the creative treatment, production, execution, and post-production of the footage.
We look forward to continuing our partnership and friendship with Celebrity Cruises as they repeatedly break ground in the travel industry.
