A Grey Matter Celebrated by Land Rover & Ratigan

HLA director Simon Ratigan has helmed this new spot for Land Rover which celebrates the cold, grey and often complained about weather of the British Isles.

Called Hibernot, the spot features a host of beautiful, if grey, locations in which people are enjoying the environment by hiking, running, surfing, walking the dog and various other activities.

Below Ratigan talks about the process of making the spiot, finding the right locations and why not having the car in the spot at all makes for a very welcome - and brave - change.

What did you think when you first saw the script and did you immediately know how to approach it? 

I loved the script the moment I saw it. It dealt with such a quintessentially British phenomenon and one that we never get asked to film, a grey day. It seems like a national obsession to moan about it and here was a script that wanted to celebrate it and turn it into something beautiful, joyful and exciting.

There are a lot of locations in the spot; what was the location scouting process like and where did you end up shooting?

I suppose my immediate concern was being able to find and capture the different kinds of greyness we get, especially with a large crew and only a few days to shoot. So I decided to simplify the equipment we used, reduce the size of the crew and extend the number of shoot days.

This gave us the extra time needed for the weather to show up, and in early January it did. Record high tides, 60mph winds and more rain than most shoots would endure before calling the insurers in. Lucky that, but then we were in Wales.

We had to focus our efforts on one specific area of the country, as there wasn’t enough time to travel all around the UK. Given that we needed to find, amongst other things, surfing and mountains, there were only a few options open to us.

North Wales proved the most suitable, as we could find both of these within an hour's drive. On top of that the low-lying land around the Llyn Peninsula gave us the rolling greenery of middle England as well as small community life that didn’t look or feel particularly Welsh.

You don't once see the car in the ad; was that always part of the script and how unusual is that situation?  

The one thing we didn’t have to worry about were winding roads through mountain valleys to film a car driving along. From the start, the script was about enjoying the weather and no car was mentioned. I thought this was just wishful thinking by the agency and was waiting for car shots to enter the conversation. They did and we filmed one, but the senior client, who wasn’t on the shoot, was brave enough never even to ask to see it.

Does not showing the product in a commercial give you more freedom with the execution?

It’s quite remarkable really, but then before Christmas I shot a Eurostar spot and they were happy to show just a seat and a door. Maybe the obligatory product shot is becoming a thing of the past. I doubt it, but still, I hope it’s a sign of a shift towards purer ideas and bolder clients. It’s been long overdue.

Your previous article for us talked about shooting on film versus digital; which was this shot on and why?

The spot was filmed using a number of digital formats, the Arri Alexa being the dominant format along with the Canon 1DC and 5D. We could have shot entirely with the Alexa or on film, for that matter, but the size and flexibility of these smaller cameras made it possible to walk out into the sea or carry kit up the mountains and we wouldn’t have captured some of the amazing weather or spontaneous moments of real life without them.

What was the most challenging part of the shoot and why?  

At the start of the project the biggest challenge seemed to be making sure we found bad weather. But with bad weather aplenty, it quickly became clear that filming it was the going to be much harder.

The best rain deflector in the world struggles with sleet blowing directly into the lens. And without a deflector, as was the case when using the Canon cameras, the rushes often looked like we were shooting through a tank of water.

Wiping furiously with dripping lens cloths, huddling around tripods to keep the wind off cameras and sending out for dry soaks on a daily basis were just part of our battle against the elements.

You know it’s going to be a challenge when you find yourself soaked by an unexpectedly large wave and it’s 8 in the morning on the first day and you’ve only just turned over. But it was fantastic to be out in the wild, capturing nature at its visual best. I think most people on the shoot would do it all again at the drop of a hat, which must go to show what a ‘grey and pleasant land’ we really do live in.