Written by new-contact on Feb 14, 2012. Posted in Production News

The Lift deals with the heat of summer on location in an Italian fishing village

The Lift has travelled to the Italian island of Procida for a new spot for Rexona deodorant. The ad shows a sack of sea salt splitting open in a traditional fishing village, affecting everything from the wildlife through to a local runner.

Agency LOLA in Madrid was looking for a rugged Italian landscape and initially pinpointed Cinque Terre in the north-west of the country. This was abandoned when they realised the rough terrain would make it difficult to access with all the filming equipment, plus their shoot dates fell at the height of the Italian summer holidays in August.

Procida is very small and equipment had to come from Rome, Naples, Barcelona, Hamburg and Berlin. Crew also had to come from all over Europe.

Ana Laura Solis, Producer

Gonzalo Olivera is with LOLA: “We needed the natural look and feel of a fishing town. [We] also considered Biarritz and some little towns of the Basque country.”

Procida, a small island off the west coast of Italy, near Naples, was chosen in the end. Ana Laura Solis produced for The Lift: “Procida is very small and equipment had to come from Rome, Naples, Barcelona, Hamburg and Berlin. Crew also had to come from all over Europe. The Italian culture is quite different and not everyone spoke English on the island, which made it a bit difficult to communicate, but in the end everything came out really well!”

Although access was more forgiving than it would have been in Cinque Terre, getting equipment to Procida was still a challenge, even once it had been imported from across Europe. Most of the four-day shoot was spent filming on and around the historic dock, but to get there the crew had to trek up and down tight stairwells between the surrounding buildings during the burning heat of the Italian summer.

Luckily the locations themselves were mostly a matter of point-and-shoot. Solis concludes: “We dressed them with a few props but the amazing thing about this island is that locations and casting are perfect for what we wanted; it looks like a set! We did end up building a little roof on the terrace/cafe scene, [but] the rest was all kind of there.”

Credits:
Client: Rexona
Agency: LOLA, Madrid
Agency Producer: Cristina Español
Account Supervisor: Gonzalo Olivera
Production Company: The Lift, Barcelona
Producer: Roderick Schroder
Executive Producer: Ana Laura Solis
Production Service Company: Filmmaster, Milan
Producer: Simona Ferraro
Location Manager: Domenico Scotto
Director of Photography: Mark Bliss
Director: Michael Wong