Two Teams Collaborate Culturally Across Continents

 “It won’t be easy. It’ll be a challenge especially in times of a pandemic.”

These were the words that echo in my head, as I sit and type this blog. They were a serious statement by agency lead of Make it China, Dennis Hu, and two years later have proved prophetic. Has anything been easy since the world was spun off its trajectory by a virus that ricocheted across the globe?  

Shooting in Changsha

The venture that Mendip Media and Make it China embarked on in January 2021 was to produce the first video in a series of short promotions aimed at the western tourist market about the city of Changsha in Hunan Province.  

At that time, the project seemed a risky investment in a future that was a long way off. 

Supported by Changsha’s Municipal Bureau of Culture, Tourism, Radio and Television, the China National Tourist Office London, the West of England Combined Authority and the Bristol and West of England China Bureau, the video venture was to be a true collaboration across continents.

Mendip Media meets to Storyboard Changsha Old Streets Film

With a creative team leading in Bristol and a large production team in Changsha, the key to its success was to be meticulous preparation, a great bilingual producer based in the UK and video conferencing.

Changsha is a city of over 10 million people located on the Xiang River in central southern China. It is a historic place with references to it first appearing 2,400 years ago in the Qin Dynasty.

To be involved in a video promoting its unique past was a privilege.

In the UK, Mendip Media was working blind. Our team had only a superficial knowledge of the place after visiting it twice in the years before the pandemic.

Whilst Changsha is an ancient city, the historic core sits in the middle of a vast modern metropolis. Our eyes and ears on the ground were our creative partners in situ who used extensive video recces to shape the choice of locations that we thought would interest a western visitor.

Without our bilingual producers, we would have been unable to move forward. All meetings, outlines, scripts, storyboards, recces, file names, indexing required translation. And then there was Covid. Our plans were shaped by the pandemic as it played havoc with society.

Lockdowns, masks, illness knocked schedules in both the UK and Changsha. As one recovered and unlocked, the other was plunged into a stay-at-home routine.

But with determination and commitment, the production took shape, until finally with actors and film crew ready, the storyboard was filmed in Changsha’s ancient streets on May 25th and 26th 2022, nearly a year and half after the project was initiated. 

Watch this space for the launch of the Changsha Ancient Streets promotional video, due in September.

Video Meeting in the UK with Changsha Production Team