Princess Cruises
Princess Cruises’ widely distributed marketing team works together across continents, using Frame.io to centralize their creative collaboration.
Frame.io Helps Princess Cruises Navigate Remote Workflows from Idea to Completion.
Challenge
With headquarters in California, a creative team spread across two continents, and a complex production in the wilds of Alaska, the video team at Princess Cruises needed a way to centralize their assets, people, and processes. Their “once-in-a-decade" brand refresh involved a small crew traveling by air and land with seven cameras capturing 15TB of footage to deliver an extensive video and photo package for their highest revenue-generating products, their Alaska cruises and land excursions. The 100-day preparation period was essential to working through logistics and assuring dozens of stakeholders that the investment would yield the world-class results they expected. Knowing what footage existed and identifying exactly what they needed to capture on this shoot—especially the “impossible” shot of Denali at sunrise—was key. Adding to the already challenging shoot was the last-minute request for a selects reel to be shown at a Princess leadership meeting taking place 36 hours after they wrapped production!
Solution
Frame.io and Adobe Creative Cloud gave the team the tools they needed to take this project from ideation to completion. The director created photographic references in Photoshop to show both his video and photo teams exactly what he envisioned, while the creative director built vision boards for each scene, plus wardrobe, hair, and makeup in InDesign, and shared those ideas with the entire crew (and stakeholders) in Frame.io during creative prep. Throughout the two-week Alaska shoot, Director Scott Martin was able to communicate quickly with his Texas-based editor in Frame.io. The metadata and Collections features allowed them to easily manage the vast amount of footage and organize it in ways that made it possible to deliver their selects reel faster than they ever had in the past. Working in Premiere Pro and After Effects, the editor exchanged assets with other creative collaborators through Frame.io, and using anchored comments gave them a way to clearly identify specific tasks and execute them accurately.
Results
From capturing the dramatic Denali footage to hitting the 36-hour turnaround for the meeting, the entire process was an unqualified success. The Princess executives lauded it as “the best content from a land-based production” they had ever seen, stating that they had created a record volume of work, at an extremely high level, and provided previews at record speed. The team delivered video and photo content for broadcast, web, and social media, and now have a vastly expanded library of Alaska assets for the future. The ability to repurpose this content means that the initial cost of capturing it is reduced, and categorizing the content using Frame.io metadata and Collections makes it easy for other teams to access and use it.
"We’ve coined the term “collaboration velocity.” With Frame.io we’re able to communicate at speeds we’ve never been able to before."
Scott Martin Senior Manager of Media Production, Princess CruisesLearn why Frame.io is the creative anchor for Princess Cruises.
A creativity solution
Originally developed as a collaboration solution for video, Frame.io now also robustly supports photography workflows. With both photographers and filmmakers able to share ideas and assets in Frame.io, Scott finds that rather than communicating separately with each group he’s able to communicate with both in one place, which helps achieve a more unified creative vision.
Frame.io also unifies teams across continents and time zones, with numerous collaborators and “dozens” of stakeholders participating in the creative process. Centralizing everyone with the assets themselves in Frame.io is the Princess teams’ way of keeping everyone creatively aligned, even while respecting work hours and sleep schedules. For those, like Scott, who want creativity to flow irrespective of the time or his whereabouts, he can remain as connected as he wants, even to the point of “falling asleep with Frame.io” on his iPad during the Alaska shoot. He also appreciates the ability to aggregate all the feedback within Frame.io, rather than having to wrangle it across different applications.
A bespoke workflow
The more demanding the project, the more flexible the workflow needs to be to support the processes and people involved. Shooting in remote locations with seven cameras, lengthy interviews, and capturing copious B-roll requires an elegant way to sort through 15 TB of footage and organize it into something manageable. Frame.io’s support of metadata allowed the editors to assign specific labels to the footage (e.g. shot compositions, lens flares or lighting effects, frame rates, etc.) and create Collections—smart folders that update in real time—based on those criteria. These customized Collections allowed them to more easily build all the collateral required for this project, as well as giving them a more meaningful and accessible library of assets to be used for future campaigns.
An ecosystem for the future
Having a set of creative tools that’s fully based in the Adobe ecosystem further enables the Princess team to streamline their workflow. Because the director can mark selects with comments in Frame.io as he’s shooting so the editor can then import them as markers to their Premiere Pro timeline, they’re able to collaborate more quickly and accurately. The fact that Adobe continues to deepen integrations between Frame.io and Creative Cloud tools and develop new features, along with their overall dependability and consistency, is something a world-class creative team relies on whether they’re out in the wild or at their offices. Most importantly, Adobe helps the team at Princess feel as though the creative tools they love continue to evolve with them, so they can continue to create amazing work.
Up Next
See how agencies, brands, and studios are leveraging Frame.io.
