Fireside

With 2020 putting the world on hold, Fireside Summit took a year out and expanded into brand prototypes with Fireside Brew coffee. As part of the project, we filmed a series of adventure promos in Wales and the southwest. The first, filmed in Hereford, saw us camping out in the woods and heading up the Black Hills by day. Understanding the off-grid/wilderness provenance of the brand, the idea of a ‘cowboy style’ coffee seemed like a strong opportunity. Guys boiling pans over campfires, rows of herded sheep and sweeping drones of the mountain ridge combined with a slide guitar soundtrack all contributed towards a promotional video more rugged than anything seen on the coffee market whilst at the same time appealing to a potential ‘outdoors’ market. The next was filmed in Talybont in Wales, this time setting up base in a cottage whilst hitting the hills and reservoir with the drone. Our most recent promo was filmed in North Devon where we teamed up with outdoors enthusiast Vicky Tapsell to capture the rugged coastline, throwing every technique we had at it including drone and underwater filming.

Concept design for North Devon shoot

I began working with Fireside back in 2018 for their Blockercon blockchain conference in Bristol. Richard, the owner of Fireside, is a friend and a person who I have worked with in a previous life. A very entrepreneurial guy and someone to talk to if you want a feel for what’s the next big development in marketing and tech, so we’ve always shared something of a maverick mindset. Blockchain and crypto can get very technical it this can act as something of a barrier to those with an interest in the subject. so for the Blockercon video coverage, I wanted to show the breadth of content without bogging it down in tech-speak choosing instead to centre in on the people and personalities at the event, making it feel a little more fun.

Following Blockercon 2019, sensing a turn in the market Richard rebranded to Fireside Summit, an event that, right in line with Zeyus own devotional ethos, was to be an off-grid tech and sustainability event, hosted not in a stuffy conference hall but on an organic farm. For the promo video I had nothing more than a sunset meadow with which to paint the picture so I used drone footage as the basis of the video, borrowing a sample of the now-famous Pastor at the wedding of Megan Markle and Prince Harry who, for reasons that baffle, decided to make the connection between fire and technology. With the drone able to give a sense of the space I then used close-up shots to punctuate the video with details of the surrounding nature, all of which I bathed in a honey-toned LUT to tie everything to the setting sun. During the summit, I provided video coverage of speakers and workshops in two areas simultaneously whilst also providing live sound engineering and recording. The highlights video then incorporated everything stylistically that had gone before.