Clients: Olive Garden / MoFilm / Dentsu McGarry Bowen

Creative Direction: Massimiliano Milic

Art direction: Paolo Prossen

Director: Ivan Gergolet

Copywriting: Paolo Prossen, Massimiliano Milic, Ivan Gergolet e Benedetta Gargiulo

DOP: Fulvio Enrico Bullo

1st AD Marta Pasqualini

Editor: Giulio Ainzara

2nd AD Alberto Liverani

UPM: Benedetta Porcelli

Production Coordinator: Robert Drakonja

Video Assist: Urban Košir

Gaffer: Matjaz Bajc

Art Director Assistant: Elena Zamparutti

Costumes: Giuditta Lazzarini

Set decorator: Daniele Braida

Video Colourist: Stefano Marconcini

PA: Ludovico Armenio, Marjan Plavac, Matteo Michelutti, Rok Spacapan

Making Of PH Camilla Bach

Press: Nicolò Giraldi

Casting Agency: Galaxia Casting 

 

CONTEXT

Olive Garden is a restaurant-chain of Italian-style cuisine in the United States. With annual revenues are $ 3.6 billion, the company has decided to open new restaurants in Las Vegas (USA). Olive Garden's communication agency is Dentsu McGarry Bowen in collaboration with MOFILM.

CHALLENGE

Telling Italian "La Dolce Vita" in a video to be shown in the Olive Garden restaurants in Las Vegas. This is the request that the American agency MoFilm asked us when it invited us to participate in a private tender together with other Italian creative agencies. The budget available was around $92,000 dollars.

Capturing the atmosphere of Italian life in its everyday life: this is the video that the two New York agencies asked us to produce, through the representation of a typical Italian day in a square with its cafes, restaurants and markets, as well as the people who populate it. In fact, MoFilm and Dentsu McGarry Bowen wanted to make Olive Garden customers feel as if they were in the middle of a square in the Bel Paese.

The real challenge, however, was another one, mainly from a technical point of view: that of making three 90-minute videos in sequence shot each, without the director being able to call the much-needed "stop/cut!". The three videos contain three distinct situations, each for a particular moment of the day: lunch, aperitif and dinner. Finally, a further task to complete the picture: dividing the 16:9 shot into three equally distinct vertical sections. For each section, the agencies required continuous action with the actors for the full ninety minutes.

SOLUTION

In this competition with other national creative agencies, our creative proposal was the most convincing, thus allowing us to win our first international account. The concept was presented by our creative director Massimiliano Milic and art director Paolo Prossen. The proposal contained a draft of the screenplay, a storyboard, some directing ideas for the coordination of the talent-actors, some stylistic and aesthetic choices and a selection of possible locations.

The pre-production phase started in mid-June 2021 and lasted for almost a month. In the first two weeks the script was done. For this work, in addition to taking into account the subdivision of the shot into three parts, we have considered inserting typical Italian roles, actions and situations: from the ice cream seller to the kids playing football in the street up to the most typical markets in Italian squares. At the same time we secured the location for the filming. The choice of shooting location fell on the main square of Cividale del Friuli, a town in the north-east of Friuli Venezia Giulia. A city of Lombard heritage whose square struck us with its splendid colored buildings and large spaces.

With the approval of the script and the location we moved on to the casting phase with the collaboration of the talent agency Galaxia Casting and the selection of the troupe including the well-known director from Gorizia Ivan Gergolet, in competition with his "Dancing with Maria" at the 71 ° International Exhibition of the Venice Film Festival in 2014, our Director of Photography Fulvio E. Bullo and the editor Giulio Ainzara.

The production took place in late July and lasted for one day with nearly 70 crew and cast. Post-production took almost ten days, delivering the final product to the client by mid-August.