For just over a year EE was the only provider of 4G in the UK. As the other networks finally released their 4G services we needed to show how EE’s 4G was faster and bigger than all the others.
This was my last project while working at Poke, while Framestore handled the production and effects, which made my job transition from one company to the other eerily smooth.
We made a video with a proper film star and a bloke off the telly! This project was for a partnership with EE and Google. EE wanted to promote watching video on 4G while Google wanted to promote watching longer videos on YouTube – so we decided to make a genuine piece of YouTube video content that illustrates this rather than your usual advert.
(See it here if you’re outside the UK)
I wrote and Creative-Directed it, with some writing help from Mark Bushnell who came up with the “no this is a bacon sandwich” line, much loved by the YouTube comments. We worked closely with Jamie’s team to design the 2 sandwiches, and make sure the content we were creating felt like a genuine Jamie Oliver Food Tube episode – the video only exists on Jamie’s channel after all, not EE’s.
It was a pretty hectic half day shoot, but Kevin is of course an absolute pro, and Jamie did a great job getting Kevin and crew excited. It’s hard to believe but the chainsaw was actually Jamie’s idea, not mine.
For the close-ups, we worked with a great chef who’s hands and arms (after some shaving and hair dying) matched Kevin’s perfectly, we even got a double for Kevin’s wedding ring for him. My proudest moment was stepping in as the stunt man (or the only person stupid enough) to hold the loaf while it was being chainsawed in half.
The video reached 2.5 million views within 2 weeks, and is Jamie’s most watched YouTube video by quite a margin. I know we’re not supposed to read the YouTube comments but it’s great to see so many like “First ad on YouTube I haven’t actually skipped”.
To show how much better watching YouTube videos is on 4G from EE, compared to 3G, we took Fenton (the UK’s favourite viral video), and remastered it.
We worked with Passion Raw and David Allen, an Emmy award winning wildlife director. It was a full 2 week wildlife shoot across 3 locations with a huge range of wild and trained animals. Then another month of post production work back in London to add in some of more fantasy special guest stars for the big ending.
