Sun and Sand Sports Escape the City Campaign
One device across four disciplines, then a fifth, finished in multiple sizes and durations, in English and Arabic, for the UAE and for Saudi.
- Client
- Sun and Sand Sports
- Year
- 2020
- Location
- UAE
- Category
- Sports & Action Video
- Production
- Shadow Productions
- Photographer
- Naim Chidiac
Sun and Sand Sports is a sports retailer with stores across the GCC. Escape the City was commissioned as a set of films, one per discipline: cycling, hiking, mountain biking and trail running, each in its own UAE location.
The campaign ran on a single device that had to hold everywhere. Every film opens on the city, moves out into the landscape, and arrives on people getting ready and then working. The line escape the city animates in at the top, the retailer’s mark closes it.
Those four were shot on separate days, in terrain with nothing in common. They read as one campaign because the opening and the close are identical and the beats between them land in the same places, so the fourth film is recognisable within two seconds of starting. Get that wrong and the client has four unrelated films sharing a logo.
Every setup was shared with the stills photographer Naim Chidiac, whose images ran alongside the films, so motion and stills competed for the same light and the same short sunrise and sunset windows.
Delivery was the hardest part. Each film had to finish in multiple sizes and multiple durations, in English and in Arabic, and in a UAE version and a Saudi version. The two are separate markets for a GCC retailer, with their own media buying and their own requirements for what runs, so each takes its own build. Those lists multiply against each other, and that is the real size of the job.
A matrix that size gets decided before the first cut, not halfway through it. The films were made for Instagram, post and story, so vertical and horizontal both had to be real versions rather than a landscape cut with its sides trimmed off, which in 2020 was still the exception. Frames were composed knowing they would also live upright, and the titling stayed on its own layer so a language or market version was a build of the same edit, not a rebuild.
Then the campaign grew past its brief. A fifth film, winterwear, was shot after the others and added to Escape the City. A different season, a different kind of location, and none of it existed when the structure was designed. It took the same opening, the same close and the same beats, and went out through the same matrix of sizes, durations, languages and markets.
