Devondale is Australia's largest dairy producer and is owned by a co-operative of over 2000 local farming families. This ad was designed to solve two problems facing the company. The first was to halt the talent drain away from the industry by making people proud to be Devondale farmers. The second was to differentiate the brand by communicating the company's family nature. The result was 'Morning Strangers' - ironically it's a story about how much hard work and sacrifice it takes to be a dairy family, told through the actions of Devondale farmers across Australia.

How do you create an epic ad about Australia's entire population of dairy farmers, when you only have limited locations, a tight budget, and a terrified cast of farmers? You get creative.

This is how we created scale - camera angles and lighting gave geographically similar areas a different look and feel, even though most were only paddocks apart. Everything else we invented on the fly - leftover diesel turned a wet paddock into an inferno, a redirected irrigation pipe produced a flooded river, whilst a helicopter simulated a hurricane (and allowed for some nice aerial shots too). We even found a role for a snake from the shed. All this was achieved using two Red cameras - operating simultaneously to condense the shooting schedule - and lots of helpful farmers. Hopefully the finished ad feels bigger than that.

In summary, our enforced low-fi approach, and our farmers' ingenuity, combined to create the epic piece of film the client requested... but none of us expected.