Suite Tours – Melbourne & Hamburg

We were commissioned by Wooshii and the New York-based ad agency Our Man in Havana to capture virtual suite tours for luxury global hotelier Park Hyatt at their Melbourne and Hamburg properties.

These videos were part of a substantial content package, consisting of 154 videos for 32 hotels shot across 18 countries. The goal was to showcase Park Hyatt’s residential-style luxury suites through an immersive, experiential approach.

We leveraged our contacts in Melbourne and Hamburg to assemble locally based crews—comprising a cinematographer, AC/Gimbal Operator, and DIT—and sourced equipment from local rental houses. Two members of the Ether/Awe team flew out to oversee the shoots.

The challenge was to shoot four suites in a single 10-hour day at both locations, which put significant time pressure on capturing everything needed. This was not a run-and-gun shoot; we had a very specific and extensive shot list to follow, and it was essential that the shooting style remained consistent with the content captured at the other 30 hotels.

We conducted a recce of the suites the day before the shoots, giving us time to dress the spaces and thoroughly map out our shooting plan and shot list, closely following the blueprint established for the other videos in the content package. We also conducted a mini test shoot and set up and tested our cameras and rigs—namely the DJI Ronin M with EasyRig and mechanical slider—the evening before. While natural light filled the rooms, we supplemented it with Kino Flos to ensure evenness and softness in the lighting, maintaining consistency throughout each space. This was especially necessary in Hamburg, where rapidly changing weather conditions – switching from overcast to heavy rain, then to beaming sunshine – posed a challenge.

Wooshii’s internal edit team handled the edits under an incredibly tight turnaround time of seven days post-shoot.

To meet the deadline, we uploaded the footage to a remote server for the Wooshii team to access and begin editing as soon as possible. The footage was captured in 4K ProRes 422 HQ at 50fps, resulting in massive file sizes – over 1TB per shoot.

To ensure timely delivery, we hired local DITs to organise, label, and upload the files after wrapping on each suite. They compiled selects of the best takes, created smaller proxy files for the Wooshii team to work with while waiting for the raw footage to download, and made physical backups. We worked with the DITs throughout the night to ensure all assets were delivered within 24 hours of wrapping.

The final videos were well received by the client and achieved significant click-through rates across Park Hyatt’s website and social media platforms.

The edits seamlessly fit into Our Man in Havana’s comprehensive content package, with production value, style, and aesthetic matching the other videos in the series perfectly.

Although we were approached to produce additional videos in Russia and Beijing for this series, these shoots were canceled due to the 2020 lockdown.

Overall, this was an incredibly enjoyable project for Ether/Awe. We relished the challenge of collaborating with clients and suppliers across three continents—something that would become a hallmark of our work in the years to come!

The final content is currently being used to promote the suites on the Park Hyatt website.

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