In early 2021 we began talking to CFA’s Marketing, Communications and Social Media team about producing 5 social media spots to promote and raise public awareness around topics of Summer Fire Safety.

Working closely with the team and their specialists we developed concepts, scripts and detailed storyboards and began pre-production.

Local pandemic lockdowns posed incredible difficulties and delays to production, and forced us to develop unusual approaches to production design and the logistics around each film.

Given that summer was wrapping up, one of the other large hurdles we faced was creating what felt like a dry fire risk environment, complete with long dry grass, sunshine and of course fire. This saw us gathering large quantities of dry grass and stockpiling it in our studio warehouse until we were able to shoot.

For the VEHICLES IN LONG GRASS video, which was to depict how a hot exhaust can ignite dry grass, we chose to film at Guerilla HQ so that we had complete control over the environment. We had our friends at Diversity Rigging cut a car in half to make it more manageable to work with, as well as removing the petrol tank for safety. We then mounted a camera underneath and used a virtual production technique (using a large TV sitting in the background) to simulate various roads, from suburban to rural. This approach also allowed us to use practical lighting effects beneath the car. Here is the final result…

For the PREPARE YOUR PROPERTY video, we built the corner of a house so that we could film the gutters being cleaned. We later filmed the entire thing burning down (which we shot practically). As the camera hadn’t moved between each scenario, we were able to start the edit on the fire and then give the illusion that time was rewinding to show what could have been done to prevent the fire taking place.