TL;DR
Three of us spent one week filming customer stories in the Netherlands, Italy and France, for the opening film of Geotab’s first Connect Europe conference in Barcelona. The only casualty was the slate.
This spring, Andrew, Kaitlyn and Callan flew to Europe with the most efficient multi-camera package we could build. The assignment was one week, three countries, three customer stories, all of it feeding the video that would open Geotab’s first Connect Europe conference in Barcelona. Everyone else stayed home, on purpose. More on that later.
The Ask
Open Geotab’s first Connect Europe conference with three customer stories. The customers happened to be in three different countries. The calendar gave us one week.
Geotab makes the technology that keeps track of the world’s work vehicles. Founded in Oakville, Ontario, they connect millions of vehicles and process billions of data points every day, telling fleets where their trucks are, how they’re driven and when they’ll need service. We’ve worked with them for years on explainers, training content and campaign work like Vision Zero, which took us to New York and San Francisco. Last fall we flew to London to film customer stories across the UK. So when they asked us to do it again at triple the scale, we didn’t have to think about it for long.
The Packing Math
We maxed out the airline baggage allowance to the kilogram and filled every rental SUV to the tailgate. Cameras and lenses travelled on their own passport, a customs document that lets film gear cross borders without drama, along with enough drives to back up ten terabytes of footage twice.
Sandbags and light stands don’t fly, though. The package our look required was van-sized, so we built a local crew in each country through fixers, the pros every travelling production leans on. Gaffers and grips arrived with the kit, the vans and the answers. Local crews know the roads, the plugs and the coffee.
Rented lighting arriving on set in France, and the packing math working out.
Stop 1: Picnic in the Netherlands 🇳🇱
We landed in Amsterdam jet-lagged and scouted the location that same afternoon. Then we grabbed bikes, rode into the city, and ate what we all still agree were the best tacos of our lives. The jet lag never stood a chance.
Amsterdam by bike, and the tacos in question. We stand by the claim.
The story we came for was Picnic, an online supermarket that delivers groceries across the Netherlands, Germany and France in tiny electric trucks that might be the most charming fleet vehicles on Earth. Picnic runs 5,000 of them, all electric, across more than 200 hubs in three countries. That is not an exaggeration. They have moustaches.
High-vis crew, low-riding star.
We filmed three interviews with a consistent setup inside the depot, trucks lined up behind every frame, then spent the rest of the day chasing b-roll of them threading through Dutch streets.
Stop 2: Lactalis in Italy 🇮🇹
Then Milan, our base for the Italian leg. This story belonged to Lactalis, the largest dairy group in the world. Their Italian fleet runs about 1,800 refrigerated vehicles that keep milk, cheese and yogurt on shelves across the country.
It rained on our shoot day, which complicated everything the schedule was built around and gave the footage a moody, cinematic look we couldn’t have planned. Sometimes the weather does the colour grade for you.
The interview was in Italian, which none of us speak beyond “grazie mille.” The conference edit couldn’t wait for us to get home, so the audio flew to Waterloo that night, came back as a translation document by morning, and Geotab had the story confirmed before we boarded for France.
Field research. Prosciutto in Parma, pizza in Milan.
The schedule gave us a weekend between shoot days, and Andrew turned a rest day into a 36-hour side quest to snowboard in Laax.
Spring laps on a ribbon of snow through green grass. Worth the detour.
Stop 3: EPNAK in France 🇫🇷
The last leg took us into the countryside near Auxerre, and France was, in a word, beautiful. This story was EPNAK’s, a public organization that supports people with disabilities across France and runs more than eight hundred vehicles getting the students and workers it serves where they need to be.
We scouted from the roadside on the drive in, rebooked our hotel that night to be closer to set, and shot the final story the next morning. The call sheet from home carried one firm instruction. Release the driver by 2:00 pm. He had a two-and-a-half-hour run back to Paris, and overtime is overtime in any language.
The autoroute lunch stop, and the escargots that required documentation.
The Part You Don’t See
A three-person crew only works when the team at home is anything but lean. While we were on the road, our producer was rebooking hotels and building call sheets from Waterloo, our production manager was wrangling gear suppliers in two languages, and interview audio was becoming translation documents within hours of wrap. Three people held cameras. The whole team made the trip.
We touched down in Toronto on a Thursday night, and the drives were plugged into the ingest station before midnight. A month later the three stories were cut into one anthem to open Geotab’s first Connect Europe in Barcelona.
Final tally. Three countries, three customer stories, roughly ten terabytes of footage, and exactly one piece of gear lost or damaged along the way. It was the slate.
About the client
Geotab was founded in 2000 by Neil Cawse in Oakville, Ontario, and has grown into a global leader in connected vehicle and asset management: roughly six million connected vehicles and assets worldwide, one hundred billion data points processed every day, and a team of more than 2,700 people.
Arc Media is a video production company in Waterloo, Ontario. We create brand films, customer stories and event videos for technology companies at home and, occasionally, across an ocean.
More from us: Vision Zero, our earlier story with Geotab.
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