Industrial grit meets Highland drama.
Thomas Kettner, a Munich-based photographer working on behalf of Sports 2000, reached out in November. The campaign needed two contrasting visual worlds: gritty industrial environments with architectural scale and texture, alongside dramatic natural landscape. He had Scotland in mind. I had a specific answer.
I proposed combining Glasgow with the Isle of Skye. On paper they're opposites, one a post-industrial city with a character no studio can fake, the other the most cinematically dramatic coastline in Europe. Together they gave the campaign a visual range that simply doesn't exist in one place anywhere else on the continent.
Thomas agreed. Planning started immediately.
Isle of Skye & Highland locations, Sports 2000 campaign.
The locations nobody else can get.
Securing the right locations in Glasgow takes more than a recce and a phone call. I obtained filming permissions at the SECC and the Armadillo, landmark architectural venues that aren't routinely available to commercial productions, giving the industrial sequences the scale and weight the brief demanded.
We also worked with the Kelpies, and I obtained drone permits across Glasgow city centre. City-centre airspace authorisation in the UK requires coordinated CAA applications, liaison with air traffic control, and precise flight windows. It's a process that takes time and experience to navigate without delaying the shoot.
That kind of contingency doesn't appear in the photography. It appears in the schedule staying intact.
Glasgow. Urban reel, Sports 2000 campaign.
Working with the weather, not against it.
Skye operates on its own terms. Micro-climates mean conditions can shift within a single valley in under an hour. What's true on the west coast in the morning may be entirely different by afternoon. There's no point pretending otherwise.
Every evening, Thomas and I reviewed the following day's forecast together and built a plan. A, B, C, and D, so that whatever conditions emerged, we had a location and creative approach ready to go. On days the Quiraing was buried in cloud we were somewhere else, making images that only existed because of the weather, not despite it.
Every single day of the Skye leg delivered something. The combination of preparation and flexibility meant that difficult conditions became part of the visual language of the campaign rather than a problem to solve.
Isle of Skye. Highland reel, Sports 2000 campaign.
Twenty people. Three weeks. Zero fixed plans.
The production was large and fast-moving. A crew of approximately 20, with between two and four models on set at any time. Crew and cast composition changed right up to the last days of pre-production, not unusual on large campaigns, but it requires accommodation, transport, and logistics to remain genuinely flexible rather than nominally flexible.
On Skye in season, quality accommodation books months ahead. I managed bookings that stayed changeable and on budget throughout, renegotiating and restructuring as crew numbers shifted. When changes came at the last moment, we adjusted without financial penalty.
The weather monitoring started weeks before anyone flew into Edinburgh. I kept Thomas updated on developing conditions and translated forecast data into practical location decisions, so that by the time we arrived on Skye, we were already working from an informed position rather than improvising from scratch.