Stronger Hero 4 – Behind The Scenes

We were approached by Stronger, an athleisure and activewear brand from Europe to create something extraordinary and outstanding for the launch of their new high-performance active-wear collection Hero 4, an important and the best collection of the year.

Both, us and the client communicated back and forth for approximately 4 weeks in the process to develop a concept for the campaign. As Bali’s fashion video production company, we aspire to deliver the best creative campaigns for our clients based on the latest trends, using advanced camera techniques.

Here is our behind-the-scenes story in creating this special project.

Concept Development and Casting

Seeing how Stronger collection is a sustainable brand, we wanted to create a video campaign for their newest collection. We came up with the idea to build a jungle gym and shoot the whole campaign inside the forest, next to the waterfall, to go with the brand’s sustainability value and program.

During the shooting, we used only natural sources to build a gym and other workout types of equipment.

Our team brainstormed an idea and a storyline for the Stronger campaign that requires much-advanced acrobatics and also gymnastic poses, so we had to make sure that we choose the right models. In the process of finding models as talents for the campaign, we went across our database and from external sources to look for the best models available in the market that are suitable to be part of the campaign.

After a few days of communicating back and forth, we finally found the perfect match, 4 models in total where each has their own specialty, to play a role based on the script we created for the campaign. They were Tui, specialized for an advanced workout, running, and gymnastic scenes; Sasha, specialized for doing boxing scenes, to serve strong looks and high fashion poses; Mara, also specialized to do high fashion poses with a strong look; and Flores, a model specialized for dancing and stretching scenes.

Scouting Day

Next on our agenda was scouting day, where we go in search of that perfect location to do the shooting for the campaign.

We took the liberty to survey the location beforehand in order to measure and build our very own jungle gym from scratch. True to our name, WeDoCreativeFilms, we are creative people and we do productions in other aspects as well, in this case, we create our own props used in the video campaign. A week before, we decided

to go to North Bali to do scouting for the location before the actual scheduled shooting day to make sure the setting of the location goes along with each scene of the script. This becomes a crucial step in the process of production because we had many scenes including rope climbing, using gymnastics rings, boxing, cliff jumping, dancing, and battle rope in the water. Overall, the scouting took 2 days and by the end of this time we decided upon two different locations, they were Banyumala Twins and Aling Aling Waterfall. Both are two of the most beautiful places in Bali and also serve as a stunning natural background to film the campaign.

Banyumala Twins falls

Aling Aling falls

Banyumala Twins waterfall was an amazing backdrop that provided many possibilities for us, to attach climbing ropes, boxing bags, and gymnastic rings. Whereas Aling Aling waterfall was chosen because of its high cliffs to do the cliff jumping and running scenes along the river bed. Both of these locations were also spacious, so it could fit a crew of 30 people easily during the shooting day.

One day before the intended day of shooting, we also had a climbing crew checking the waterfall location and plan on attaching all the needed equipment in order to keep the models safe during the shoot.

Bali’s beautiful greeneries and natural habitat that was chosen helped us achieve an extraordinary video campaign for Stronger’s new Hero 4 activewear collection.

Arriving At The Hotel

After going through the 4 weeks of preparation, we chose to stay at a hotel 20 minutes from the waterfall location before the shooting day, to prepare and make sure everyone, including the director, photographer, talents, and other crew members were briefed to understand the schedule and shooting scenes. We made sure everyone had a good night’s sleep and was ready before shooting day.

Day I. Full Of Excitement

The walk from the parking lot to the waterfall location is approximately about 15 minutes, so all the crew, including runners, producers, director, 1AD, and photographer woke up in the break of dawn at 4 AM and left the hotel 30 minutes after to make sure we had enough time to bring all gym props, camera, and light equipment down to the waterfall.

The first shot of the day was filmed with an FPV drone of the waterfall sceneries and surrounding to achieve a couple of b-roll shots of the overall location ambiance before everyone came down as this shot didn’t require any talent.

We were lucky that day because the weather was perfect, the sky was clear and sunbeams started to shine through the trees by the time we arrived at the waterfall, making a picture-perfect shot from the nice soft light of the morning sun. Since the two models started arriving, we decided to take this opportunity to shoot as many stills and film as many shots as possible.

Following the script that we created, we always start with all the fashion scenes first before doing the performance scenes in order to get a fresh look before the sporty and sweaty look.

The models performed energetically and fiercely to generate an active scene for the videos.

Everything went as we planned and according to schedule until we did the boxing bag scene, at around 11 AM the weather decided to change its mind and the sun went away. We realized and faced the fact that it will start pouring soon. A few minutes later, the rain started to drizzle so we had to shoot and jump into the next scene whenever the rain stopped for a little bit. Thankfully we were able to shoot in this condition until 3 PM before it downpours and heavy rain showers the entire location and made it impossible for us to continue. By that moment we decided to wrap up for the day with 60% of work done and continue shooting tomorrow.

Day II. A Challenging Day For Us

We didn’t know what yesterday’s bad weather would bring to our second day, and how it has a big impact on the shooting process on the second and final day.

Day two was set to do the most challenging shots in terms of high-performance scenes. Little did we know that yesterday’s bad weather resulted in a worse condition for day two in terms of location. The heavy rain from yesterday completely destroyed one of Aling Aling waterfall’s stages when a huge part of the hill moved down to the waterfalls and blocked the pathway to where we were supposed to film many of the scenes.

Because of this, for anyone who thought that we had a tough day one, they completely changed their minds and determine that day two is going to be the most challenging day yet because of the unthought-of situation that we have to face.

Due to this unexpected change of events, we had to turn our brains and come up with a backup plan very quickly as talents were already on their way. Luckily with a great creative team, we were able to improvise and rescheduled many shots based on different locations and angles we found that morning in order to follow along with the script.

Cliff Jumping

The most anticipated and complex scene in the script was a cliff-jumping scene that required 12 meters jump from the cliff with two different perspectives to be filmed. The first shot was taken by an FPV drone as the model jumped off from the cliff and the drone circled around the talent, in order to capture the best angle of this amazing performance.

Overall it took four takes to finally get the right shot. As soon as the FPV shot was done, we continued on to the second perspective shot in which we filmed the same performance from the water using a camera water housing.

We were able to shoot other high-performance scenes with the model in the river bed using props and equipment such as the dancing scene in the water, where the models danced on a special custom-built wooden platform to attain a feeling of dancing above water to the audience. Hours were dedicated to shooting a crossfit-based performance scene where the models use props like throwing a medicine ball onto the river to get a splashing water effect, rope spinning, squad using coconut as a natural weight, and finally, doing a grand Hero shot with all the models running and walking along the river bed towards the camera.

With great teamwork, we were able to achieve amazing shots on this second and final day.

It was a wrap!

Thank You

Thanks to the whole team for giving their devoted dedication, commitment, and hard work during the two-day production process, we were able to finish all planned scenes in time despite the conditions and unfriendly weather.

Also huge thanks to the client @stronger for believing in our vision! 🙏