A launch with one take and no second night

What we were asked

A model launch. One evening, an invited audience of press and dealers, and a car that could not be shown before the reveal. Everything about the night was a single take.

Why this is a coordination problem

Launch nights do not usually fail on the idea. They fail in the seams: the stand is built to a drawing that the lighting plan did not see, the film crew needs a position that the seating plan has given to guests, the social team is briefed on a reveal time that the technical run has already moved.

Each of those is one conversation that did not happen between two suppliers who do not report to the same person.

How we ran it

• One floor plan owned by one person, with the stand, the lighting, the camera positions and the guest flow drawn on the same sheet from the first week.
• The stand built by our own production team from the same drawings, so a change on paper was a change in the workshop the same day.
• A technical run with the full audio, lighting and reveal sequence the night before, in the actual hall, with the actual car.
• The content team on site through the build, not just for the event, so the coverage had material from before the doors opened.

The forty-eight hours

We had two days in an empty hall. That is the constraint that decides everything else: it is why the stand was fabricated as numbered sections rather than built on site, and why the rehearsal was scheduled before the last of the build was finished rather than after.

What happened next

The reveal ran to the second, and the material shot during the build carried the channels for the following fortnight, which is the part of a launch night that is usually left to chance.