THIS IS AN ARCHIVE POST FROM 2014
It all started in July, when my phone rang. A film production company was looking for interesting businesses for an upcoming series, and somehow they came across Virivee. The series was part of a campaign by Telekom, the international telecommunications company.
At our first meeting, we mostly just talked and made a short introduction video, which was then sent to Telekom. They selected six businesses from all the applicants to actually take part in the filming, and Virivee was one of them.
The filming itself was great fun, and we even managed to combine business with pleasure. We had already been planning an outdoor photo shoot for the end of August, so in the end we did the filming and the photo shoot at the same time. You can actually see some of the results in the video.
The whole thing had a very family-like atmosphere. The director and her assistant are husband and wife, their son was responsible for the sound, and they had already been working with the cameraman for 20 years. So they were a very professional, well-coordinated team.
The only weak link in the whole operation was me.
I got sick the day before the shoot and felt absolutely terrible. Thanks to the very talented makeup artist, you can’t really tell from the video, but the scenes where I had to sit on the sofa and smile were absolute torture. I felt so awful that even smiling was an effort.
My makeup had to be constantly touched up, and by the end of the day I felt like I should be able to peel the whole thing off my face in one piece.
At one point I started worrying that there must be a limit to how much makeup you can put on before it starts having the opposite effect, and the increasingly thick layer would only make my now considerably deeper wrinkles more noticeable. I was hoping the sexy tights would distract everyone from my face. 😉
For the 50-second introduction that eventually ended up in the video, we shot around five or six hours of footage over two days.
There were some particularly exciting bits in there too, such as cycling round and round on a square while filming it with a head-mounted camera, just in case it turned out to be useful as B-roll. It didn’t make it into the final video, though.
The filming had another very exciting consequence too. I became very good friends with Zoltán Marton and his wife Enikő, who were the director and assistant on the shoot, and we decided to team up and start a new business together.
Our Hungarian handmade and design shop will be opening soon at 14 Dob Street, just a few doors away from the Virivee shop, which will be at number 24. 🙂
The campaign featuring the six businesses is running throughout October on RTL Klub.
You can see the other participants here: Antal Takacs, Norbert Lesko, Robert Revesz, Emese Kaldi and Peter Siraly.