Aleph Rome Hotel, Curio Collection

We were commissioned by the world-renowned hotelier Hilton to produce a motion and stills content package for their Aleph Rome property as part of the ‘Style of the Stay’ campaign.

Each hotel in the Curio Collection evokes a bespoke story through distinctive architecture, design, and world-class cuisine. The goal of this campaign was to showcase these unique features through three sets of deliverables: an elevated 30-second ad for online use, an extensive stills package, and a suite of UGC-style content shot from the talent’s perspective.

Pre-Production

This was an incredibly fast turnaround project; with only seventeen days between commission and shoot. We partnered with our friends at Wow Tapes, an award-winning Rome based production company, to assist with pre-production and help us to achieve this ambitious task.

The casting process for this project was extensive. We curated a shortlist of fifty actors and models for Hilton to review, each of which were required to supply headshots and self-tapes. After casting was completed, our costume designer was tasked with assembling three looks per talent, each of which was required to look like elevated designer wear.

After travelling to Rome for a location scout the week before filming, we pulled together an extensive storyboard and shooting plan to ensure that we captured each of the required spaces with a coherent, cinematic approach, whilst ensuring minimal impact to the guest and staff at the hotel.

Production

We shot this content package over two days at the Aleph Rome Hotel. We were tasked with capturing four different environments each day, with only ninety minutes allocated to shoot all motion and stills content. This restrictive timeframe required us to be nimble and efficient, limiting our shot list to 3-4 shots per scene and requiring our stills and social teams to work in tandem with our primary motion team.

Each space utilised in this shoot was dressed by our production design team, who infused the environments with props and set dressings to elevate the spaces and add authenticity.

The client wanted to achieve a balance between experiential and environmental elements, which required us to focus primarily on wide and mid shots of subjects and action. Minimal textures and detail shots were captured.

We opted for a two-camera setup: the Arri Alexa Mini served as our A-Cam, while the Z-Cam E2 was used primarily to capture textures. Our A-Cam was rigged to a steadicam for fluid tracking movements, with the B-Cam remaining on a tripod.

This was a shoot-only project for Ether/Awe, with edits handled by Don Broida and his post-production team in Los Angeles.

Our on-site DIT made selects of the best takes each shooting day and uploaded proxies to a dedicated Google Drive folder for the LA-based edit team to download and begin assembling the edits. The full-resolution footage was backed up onto four separate SSD hard drives: one remained in Italy, one flew back to LA with the agency, and two flew back to the UK with our producers.

This was our first project with Hilton, and our content package was highlighted as one of the strongest across the entire Style of the Stay campaign.

The success of this project led Hilton to approach us for two additional projects within this campaign and another content package for their ‘Stay Tours’ campaign!

This also marked our first collaboration with Rome-based Wow Tapes, a group of creatives we have admired for many years and hope to work with extensively going forward.

The final content is currently being used to promote the hotel on the Aleph Rome Hotel’s website, across their socials, and on billboards throughout Italy.