- Executive producerLentzas George
- ProducerParaskevopoulos Yannis
- Concept / Scriptandjuilet | Garefalakis Yorgos
- DirectorsParaskevopoulos Yannis
Afentoulis Nikolas
- DoP Afentoulis Nikolas
- 1 st ACVaxevanidis Meletis
- Production managerValmis Andreas
- Production CoordinatorAlexoulis Periandros
- Drone operatorPlakidis Thodoris
- Production assistantHatzis Yorgos
- Color correctionKarteris Dimitris
That Went Great
Central Macedonia is a great place. Home of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and as we were to find out soon, the greatest production challenge we’ve had so far.
But let’s take things from the beginning.
When we were tasked with a video campaign for Central Macedonia, we knew that we would have the chance to shoot some of the country’s most beautiful natural landscapes, to taste some of the finest traditional and contemporary local cuisine, and -like always- have loads of fun.
But there was a catch: we had to fully cover the region - pretty much all 18,810.52 km2 of it - through all four seasons!
We had to portray the exotic summer beaches, the fascinating snow slopes, and everything in between. All that without having a whole year and a colossal budget to spare. Not to mention Covid-19, which tends to make video productions -and everything else in life- a bit more complicated.
Periandros, our ballsy production designer, blanked out for a couple of minutes when we first got the brief. But then he came around, poured some water on the coffee maker, and started setting up his neet excel sheets like he always does.
According to our plan, in order to create the five-video-docu-series we had envisioned, we would need one light & flexible ten-person crew, 30 days of shooting, 120 different shooting locations, 150 hours in cars, vans, planes, and motorboats, and 900 espresso capsules (Yes, we carried around two of our espresso machines. Yes, we usually have more than two).
Spoiler alert: we managed to stay on time and on budget.
But, like every project worth remembering, the whole thing was full of turns and twists, from day one. Out of everything, we are just going to highlight that Covid regulations changed 3 times within 4 weeks(!) making it practically impossible to pre-book venues, talents, or extras.
And of course the weather!
We were prepared to make sudden changes due to unexpected weather conditions, but the intense microclimate in combination with Murphy’s law gave us a series of surreal surprises, including snowflakes when the official prediction was for 26C and sunny!
But we were rewarded with great stories to tell, and to be honest, some unexpected beautiful material. Like that day that we were about to shoot in Limni Kerkini, but the weather suddenly turned bad. Instead of canceling, and after making sure that everyone would be safe, we decided to go through and shoot using some local fishermen as our guides. The ride was rough, the fog was coming and going, and the equipment was constantly on the verge of falling off the not-so-new fishing boats.
But out of this calamity, we got one of our most serene, graceful, and iconic shots: a rare pelican (pelecanus crispus) making his smooth landing on the lake’s glassy surface. A zen masterpiece by her majesty the Nature!
We had an amazing experience, great content, and the cherry on top was that our campaign for Central Macedonia was selected by the Organisation of Greek Tourism as their official selection for all international content festivals and tourist conferences.
