A high quality commercial for The Courier which hit 40 cinemas and millions of Scottish TV screens in June has been highly commended at a prestigious national advertising awards ceremony.
For The Real Stories, produced by Edinburgh-based Greenroom Films, was shortlisted for the commercial over 21 seconds category of the Scottish Creative Awards, which were presented at a ceremony in Glasgow on Thursday night.
Greenroom Films were pipped to the title by a mockumentary Edna, for the Scottish Children’s Lottery, by STV Creative.
The awards are the succession of the Scottish Advertising Awards and have been awarding top creative work since 1997.
Over the course of two days in May, the 30-strong cast and crew attached to Greenroom Films shot at carefully selected locations throughout Dundee and Tayside – and the real Courier was given exclusive ‘behind-the-scenes’ access to the film-making process.
We followed the team as they zipped around locations including The Caird restaurant in Dundee city centre, Murray’s chippy in Broughty Ferry, waste ground at Dundee’s Kingsway East, the Prego shoe boutique in Broughty Ferry – finishing up with a memorable scene atop Arbroath cliffs.
The script, which questioned whether stories are black-and-white or whether a complex truth exists somewhere in-between, was filmed over two days with potentially hours of footage edited down later into a one minute advert for cinemas and a 30-second commercial for TV.
Glasgow-born freelance film director Martin Smith, 44, who won a Scottish BAFTA in 2006 for his gritty short film Tracks and has made numerous high profile documentaries, said it was “incredibly satisfying” to get industry recognition.
