Suite Tours – Melbourne & Hamburg

We were commissioned by Wooshii and New York based ad agency Our Man in Havana to capture virtual suite tours for luxury global hotelier Park Hyatt at their Melbourne and Hamburg properties.

These videos were part of a substantial content package, consisting of 154 videos for 32 hotels shot across 18 countries. The goal of the content was to showcase Park Hyatt’s residential-style luxury suites through an immersive, experiential style.

We utilised our contacts in Melbourne and Hamburg to assemble locally based crews – consisting of a cinematographer, AC/Gimbal Operator and DIT – and source equipment from local kit rental houses, with two members of the Ether/Awe team flying out to oversee the shoots.

We were required to shoot four suites in a single 10-hour day at both locations, which presented significant time pressure to capture everything that we needed. This was not a run-and-gun shoot, we had a very specific and extensive shot list that needed to be followed and it was essential that the shooting style remained consistent with the other content that had been captured at the other 30 hotels.

We carried out a recce of the suites the day prior to the shoots, giving us time to dress the spaces and extensively map out our shooting plan and shot list – closely following the blueprint that had been established from the other videos in the content package. We also carried out a mini ‘test shoot’ and set up and tested our cameras and rigs – namely the DJI Ronin M with EasyRig and mechanical slider – the evening before. Although a decent amount of natural light seeped into the rooms, we were required to supplement with Kino Flos to add an evenness and softness to the lighting to maintain consistency throughout each space and also to combat the changing lighting conditions outside – especially an issue in Hamburg where the weather would switch from overcast to heavy rain, to beaming sunshine consistently throughout the day.

The edits were carried out by Wooshii’s internal edit team, working to an incredibly restricted turnaround time – seven days subsequent to the shoot.

We were therefore required to upload the footage to a remote server so that the Wooshii team could download the footage and commence the edit as soon as physically possible. The footage was captured in 4K ProRes 422 HQ at 50fps, producing mammoth file sizes – equating to over 1TB per shoot.

In order to ensure that the footage could be delivered promptly and on time, we recruited local DITs to organise, label and upload files after we’d wrapped on each suite, to put together selects of the best takes, to create smaller and more manageable proxy files for the Wooshii team to work with while they waited for the raw footage to download, and to create physical backups. We worked with the DITs throughout the evening to ensure that all of the assets were delivered within 24 hours of the shoot wrapping.

The final videos were well received by the client and received significant CTRs across Park Hyatt’s website and socials.

The edits fit perfectly into Our Man in Havana’s comprehensive content package, with the production value, style and aesthetic matching the other videos in the series to a tee.

We had been approached to produce additional videos in Russia and Beijing for this series, however these shoots fell through due to the 2020 lockdown.

Overall, this was an incredibly enjoyable project for Ether/Awe. We thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of working with clients and suppliers across three continents – something that would become a forte of ours in the coming years!

The final content is being used to promote the suites on the Park Hyatt website.

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