Tiffany & Co.

Tiffany & Co had been in London for 150 years, and the House marked it by taking two of the city's landmarks at once. Harrods, where every bulb on the façade turned Tiffany Blue for the first time the store has ever changed its colour in partnership with a brand. And the Saatchi Gallery, where Vision & Virtuosity arrived in the largest form it had ever taken, seven chapters across two floors, more than 400 objects from the archives, the 128.54-carat Tiffany Diamond at the end of it.

The approach came from Tiffany's London office. Their New York team was flying in for three weeks and needed a production company here who could carry the whole thing. They had seen our De Beers work, and that seemed to be what settled it. We have spent years in fine jewellery, some of our team came out of it, and it is a world where the difference between good and very good is visible at arm's length.

Two Builds, Running At Once

Two builds, running at the same time, both live sites with the public a few feet away. Six shoots inside three weeks, each of them roughly three days, some of them day and night.

Everything had to be filmed and photographed as it happened, because none of it could be staged again. The creative direction had to hold across two venues that looked nothing like each other, and the material had to make sense to an audience in New York, Tokyo and Shanghai who would never walk down Brompton Road.

Seven Thousand Five Hundred Bulbs

Harrods is covered in white light bulbs. All 7,500 of them came out and went back in Tiffany Blue, and it took ten days, multiple cranes, and teams working through the night to do it.

We filmed it from the first bulb to the switch-on. Time-lapse rigs running continuously, documentary crews up in the cranes with the electricians, stills close enough to see the care going into a job most people would assume was mechanical. Some of the rigs were tied to lamp posts on Brompton Road, hidden, angled to catch the façade changing colour a section at a time.

The drone shot took weeks of paperwork before it took thirty seconds of flying. Brompton Road runs along the boundary between the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, so permissions came from both, and the airspace itself needed clearance that reaches all the way up to the Palace and Parliament. We flew over Harrods and down the road, once, properly.

Nicola Coughlan switched the lights on. We shot the evening with a crew of eight to ten, and the switch-on became a film of its own alongside the time-lapse, the documentary, the installation cut and the interiors. Every bulb was recycled afterwards.

Building The Exhibition

At the Saatchi Gallery we filmed and photographed the installation for three days, day and night, while the Tiffany team assembled the show around us.

Gene Moore's window displays were rebuilt, including the 1967 tug-of-war between two figurines over a diamond necklace. The 57th Street entrance was recreated. Audrey Hepburn's annotated script went into a case alongside the original Givenchy dress. The Tiffany Diamond got a diamond-shaped room of its own with a single spotlight and nothing else in it.

The team stayed deliberately small. This was an active build with strict health and safety, so crew were trained off site, sent in for a specific job, and swapped out. Between four and eight people at any one time, and a site manager whose rules we learned to work around rather than argue with. He was right, for what it is worth.

Time-lapse in a live build is part planning and part luck. Rigs had to be built into sets so they were invisible and out of the way, and more than once we set up for a room the client had told us they were working in, only for them to move somewhere else overnight. The gallery lighting caused a problem of a different order. In some rooms the frequency of the fittings put flicker and interference straight through the footage, and it took real work with the DOP, Jon Kassell, to get rid of it.