As part of International Women's Day, Amazon wanted to celebrate some of the amazing women running their DSPs across Europe, documenting their achievements on film and in print.
CHALLENGE
Amazon work with Delivery Service Partners as part of their last mile operations. This industry has historically had a male bias but there are some remarkable women running DSP operations across Europe and as part of International Women's Day Amazon wanted to shine a light on them. With filming set to take place in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany all over the space of a week there were a lot of moving parts. We needed to capture the story in a narrow window, not interfering with the day to day operation of running dozens of vans and drivers from each site.
APPROACH
We sent a crew with several cameras to follow the DSP leader, filming from multiple angles simultaneously and armed with radio comms to keep on top of movement and framing. One would stick close and capture their day while the others stood back to see the whole scene and capture the work of their colleagues. Fulfilment centres are huge places, enormous buildings with lots of fast moving teams operating like clockwork. We needed to have great comms with the floor leader to make sure we weren't standing in a place that was suddenly going to be filled with a fleet of vans or trolleys full of parcels.
Their size, noise and the number of moving parts means that although visually impressive, they're less good for filming interviews. While we were shooting with the camera operators our gaffer set up our lighting package elsewhere on the site, ready on time for the talent to walk in, sit down and tell her story.
We also rigged a livestream of our interview, direct from the camera, to be piped to legal and creative who were off site. With larger organisations, having that sort of oversight allowing for feedback while we're shooting is invaluable, rather than a contributor saying something and only finding out in the edit that we couldn't use it.
RESULTS
We created an impactful film on time and on budget, with both the client and agency giving us hugely positive feedback. We gave added value with our flexibility to shoot with multiple cameras, all timecode synced for the edit as well as providing the livestream solution for remote sign-off. And best of all we celebrated the women at the heart of the DSPs
