This is Colt—the creative design agency recently commissioned Tim for the ‘Welcome Back’ advertising campaign. Reintroducing the city of Birmingham to a historic landmark and the unrivalled social glamour of The Grand Hotel. The locations chosen within the hotel for the campaign include the lavish and opulent ballroom, the marble pillared staircase and a minimal contemporary top floor suite.
The creative director of This is Colt talks about the project—‘We wanted to capture the sophisticated and elegant nature of the roaring twenties the glamour and the atmosphere, so we knew storytelling was important in the final images. We have worked with Tim before and his approach and ideas far this particular brief really fitted with our overall vision for the campaign. We needed a great lifestyle photographer to capture inspiring and natural moments but also someone with a sense of fashion and style within their work. Looking at Tim’s recent work it just seemed a natural fit.’
Tim talks about the challenge of the brief—‘The new hotel design is both modern and romantic in style, the agency wanted to bring bold natural light into the spaces but this isn’t easy to achieve in December in England. The hotel is grand in size, bringing natural-looking daylight to these spaces isn’t as easy as you might think, especially when we couldn’t light any of the spaces from outside the hotel itself. This threw up some unique challenges but we managed to adapt a film lighting technique from Dedo called Light streaming we adapted the Dedo light streaming system with my own flash lighting to create more natural daylight feel for some shots and a stronger more golden light for the others. The system worked brilliantly and the final shots exceeded the agency and hotels expectations. It was a great team to work with and we are all really pleased with the end results. Adopting a new lighting technique for a major client was a bold move, for what turned out to be quite a challenging brief, but the results speak for themselves. As a photographer, you are always excited by the challenge of the unknown so it was really rewarding to push the levels of creativity for a more natural daylight lifestyle photographer such as myself.’
The marketing manager of the hotel has the final word—‘It’s been a challenging time bringing back to life this incredible building in the city of Birmingham and we’re really proud as a group in what we’ve achieved in the restoration process of this iconic landmark. We really can’t wait to open our doors to the public and welcome people back to a fully operational, 21st-century hotel. The safety of all our clients is of course paramount and we will be following all government guidelines on COVID 19 regulations for the hospitality sector to the letter.’
The final campaign will be seen all over Birmingham in the coming months as the hotel reopens its doors after the National lockdown is lifted.
