Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co opened on Broadway in 1837 selling stationery and fancy goods, and turned itself into one of the few jewellers the rest of the trade measures itself against. The Tiffany Setting of 1886 fixed what an engagement ring looks like. The blue box turned a colour into property, registered and defended. Audrey Hepburn did the rest. The London store has been open for a hundred and fifty years.
The Three Weeks Tiffany & Co Took Over London
Tiffany came to us directly, from their London office. Their New York team was flying over for three weeks and they wanted a production company here who could carry the whole thing. They mentioned the De Beers work, and from what they were saying that was what resonated.
We have worked with a lot of fine jewellery and some of our team came out of it. We had the film, campaign and still life work to show them, and it was an easy fit.
The anniversary was marked in two places at once. Harrods, and the Saatchi Gallery.
Harrods Went Blue First
Harrods is covered in white light bulbs. Seven and a half thousand of them came out and went back in Tiffany Blue, the first time the store had changed colour in a hundred and seventy-three years. Nicola Coughlan switched them on.
We filmed the whole build, from the first bulb to the switch-on, and flew a drone over the façade that took weeks of permissions and thirty seconds of flying. That build is its own story, and we have told it here.
The Biggest Version Ever Built
Across town, Vision & Virtuosity was going up at the Saatchi Gallery, in the biggest and most expansive version the exhibition had taken anywhere in the world. Seven chapters, more than four hundred objects out of the archives, the 128.54-carat Tiffany Diamond at the end of it. The recreated New York streets, the Blue Book rooms, the Breakfast at Tiffany's material, the theatrical cabinets built like doll's houses, the interactive walls.
We filmed and photographed the installation for three days, day and night, while the Tiffany team assembled the show around us. Time lapse cameras, stills, documentary crews, all of it pointed at the people building it rather than the finished rooms.
The team stayed small because a live build with strict health and safety demanded it. Crew were trained off site, sent in for a specific job and swapped out. Between four and eight people at any one time.
Time lapse in a live build is part planning and part luck. Rigs had to be built into the sets so they were invisible and out of the way, and more than once we set up for a room they had told us they were working in, only for them to move somewhere else overnight. The gallery lighting was a different order of problem. In some rooms the frequency of the fittings put flicker and interference straight through the footage, and it took real work with the DOP to get rid of it. That is just how shooting in a live environment works.
Rosé Danced It Instead
We made a campaign film with Rosé of Blackpink, Tiffany's global ambassador. You could hear her arriving. Tens of thousands of people had come to the streets around the gallery to cheer her on, and we heard the car before we saw it.
The plan was for her to walk the exhibition and describe the pieces. It became clear quite quickly that she did not feel like doing that. So we asked her to dance what she felt about it instead, and she did, through the whole show. We had about an hour with her and they were strict about the hour, which is fair enough given her schedule. Her voiceover was recorded there in the gallery, because that was the time we had.
It turned out to be a better film than the one we went in to make. Tiffany and Rosé loved it.
A campaign film with Rosé of Blackpink
Tiffany & Co.
“‘Vision & Virtuosity’ celebrates the House’s most defining moments, showcases the incredible collection of archives and exemplifies why Tiffany & Co. is such an iconic brand.”
Alexandre Arnault
Executive Vice President, Product & Communications
The ‘VISION & VIRTUOSITY’ red carpet event
Then the opening. Mark Ronson DJ'd and got the whole room going. There was a Tiffany nightclub built inside the gallery, opulent and theatrical, cocktails made in front of people. Twelve of us worked the night.
Adam Katz Sinding shot the red carpet. Adam does not use flash, and nobody had mentioned the event would be lit as low as it was. Lighting it properly would have meant lighting the evening and spoiling it for everyone in the room. So the pictures had to come out of the dark instead. Adam did an amazing job.
A stills team under Adam, a video team under Jon Kassell DOP and Director Mark Bage, and an edit running on site through the night. Footage went to New York while the party was still going, snippets and full films out every few hours, press cuts distributed around the world by morning.
What Went Out
Six shoots across three weeks, most of them three days, a lot of them day and night. Time lapses, documentaries, interviews, walkthroughs, drone, campaign, micro-shoots, and the making of the exhibition itself.
The films ran from twelve-second snippets up to full minute-long cuts, in every format social and standard needed. Some were made for a global audience who wanted London in the frame, the buses and the Union Jacks, done through our lens and always leading back to the gallery.
Tiffany & Co trusted the cuts. We were delivering as we went, so feedback folded into the process and there was very little of it. Everything landed on time.
The press picked it up and every major title wrote about the exhibition. They briefed us, we produced it, we delivered it, they used it, and the show moved on.
3 WEEKS
6 SHOOTS
10 FILMS
80 STILLS
25K COMMENTS
550k LIKES
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We work with fashion and luxury brands at every stage, from early brand identity work to e-commerce builds and full campaign production. If you'd like to talk about a project, we'd love to hear from you.
Client
Project
VISION & VIRTUOSITY
ADAM KATZ SINDING
JON KASSELL
MARK BAGE
MATT BUTLER
PHOEBE WHISTON
THOM HOBBS
CREDITS
FILM PRODUCTION
CREATIVE DIRECTION
CONTENT CREATION
SOCIAL CONTENT
SERVICES
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