Plot -

This year’s Christmas Advert was made with love and hard work. We started planning early October and wanted to choose between ‘office secret Santa’ (an idea by myself) or ‘Santa late delivering gifts’ (an idea by our Videographer, Matt). Matt is a great Videographer who we have had the pleasure of working with for now 3 years in a row! We were set to go ahead with ‘office secret Santa’ until I sat discussing the idea with my colleagues, and together came up with this brilliant idea of a consistent character running late to important moments in life.

Actors -

This year, we used some familiar actors that were used in our 2018 Christmas Advert as they are versed with the business, our story and our message. We also included FOUR more actors that were new to us, including a mother and her two daughters and we had a great time developing new relationships and sharing our story with them.

Watches -

Choosing the watches was different to last time. Last year, we featured mostly male watches and this year, we needed more female watches as the main character is female. We chose to use our best-selling brands which are; Seiko, G-Shock, Edifice, Garmin, Rotary, Swatch, Wolf, Tommy Hilfiger, Elliot Brown, Luminox and Victorinox.

Scenery -

Scenery was probably one of the most difficult aspects of creating this AD, but luckily, we found some great spots. One of which, being the feature of a beautiful church down the road from the WatchO office, called St Peter and St Paul Church – the lovely administrator agreed to let us film our wedding scene in there, after exchanging emails about which date and time would suit them. We also featured a beautiful park in Newport Pagnell called Ousebank Gardens for the Garmin feature scene.

FILMING DAY

Filming day was so much fun! The outfit changes, the retake’s and most of all, A DAY OUT THE OFFICE! We did a full 8-hour day, starting off with my colleague’s lovely voice-over message in the morning quoting ‘Time never stops with WatchO’.

The filming schedule got rearranged multiple times due to things like availability, school times, daylight times and making time to get ready for each scene and set up.

We started the day filming the ‘late to school’ scene – this was to keep those lovely French plaits in-tact and fresh, making the 22-year-old look 16 again! Next came the wedding scene, filmed in St Peter and St Paul Church. The actors brought their A game when it came to outfits for this scene – with the lead actress wearing her Nan’s wedding dress from 1969.

The end ‘Christmas scene’ and the beginning ‘late due date scene’ were filmed after that, both using the same house but different rooms – making travelling to different places throughout this hectic day, less difficult. The children used in the ‘Christmas scene’ and the ‘late to ballet’ scene behaved perfectly well on set and were absolute stars.

Finally, we filmed the ‘late for picking kids up’ scene and the ‘late for date’ scene. The ‘late for picking up kids’ scene was filmed JUST missing the rain and was only a short walk from the office where we filmed the ‘gym’ part of the scene. The ‘late for date’ scene was filmed last so that we could wait for the daylight to dim a bit more, giving us more of an evening look when it was naturally only 4:30.

We planned a clear schedule of where to be and what time to be there and finished the day with 15 minutes to spare before editing 2 days later.

We’re really pleased with the outcome of the video and invite you all to enjoy it with us by sharing with you some of the bloopers!!!