Working with Keanu Reeves on "Man of Tai Chi"

Last year I was very lucky to get a really awesome and unusual job - working on the set of Man of Tai Chi directed and starred in by Keanu Reeves! 

It started when my friend asked me if I'd like to come along to assist with the aerial shooting for the film, which resulted in me joining the reconnaissance flights with the assistant director and acting as ground crew for the helicopter. Then after chatting with the Locations Manager for a while I found out that they were still missing a key location for the final shooting days - an underground car park. I decided to offer my services! A few days later and after a lot of phone calls to old friends, I had their property booked - the basement car park of Exchange Tower, a landmark building from Sino Land in Kowloon Bay. 

Shortly after that I got invited to be on set again, this time for the green screen shooting at the legendary Shaw Studios in Tseung Kwan O. It was an incredibly exciting night! Apart from getting to watch them building machines that would spin and implode cars and erect three storeys of green screen, it was also the same night that Typhoon Vicente hit, the first typhoon to reach T10 (the highest signal) since 1999! We worked right through the typhoon and when we left at 5am in the morning trees were blown all over the roads and destruction and debris was everywhere. Despite that, it was a fantastic night. Just incredible to watch some of the most dramatic scenes of the film come together whilst the typhoon raged around us. At the end we took the crew photos and you can just about spot me hiding on the left hand side:  

After we wrapped the shooting though the fun wasn't entirely over, as I got asked to help out on one final duty: organising the wrap party! Can't have a film shoot without a wrap party and with aviation still in mind, we decided to have ours at The Aviation Club located at the old airport in Kai Tak. It was a great fun night with a live Blues & Funk band, lots of delicious food and most importantly plenty of alcohol. We even had a photo booth with all kinds of bizarre props like knight's helmets and swords to take photos of ourselves with. Everyone had a great time and Keanu and his team were able to relax and let off some steam.

Here we are at the after party (no idea why I look so miserable about what was actually a great night):

If you're a fan of Keanu Reeves and enjoyed reading this then please make sure to check out the trailer for Man of Tai Chi below:

PizzaExpress Hong Kong Showcase Video!

Well I have to say that I have been a very long time fan of the PizzaExpress brand, specifically 20 years long since I first went to London as a student in 1993. The idea that I could eat fantastic fresh baked Italian style pizza for a budget within my pretty limited student range and even get to see the Pizzaola tossing the dough, all seemed a bit unreal to me coming from the PizzaHut dominated land of Hong Kong. So when they came to me all that time later and asked if I would be interested to work on a new showcase video for them, as you can imagine I very enthusiastically said "YES". 

Before we could get started on the video itself, we needed to attend meetings and have lots of discussion time, this meant lots and lots of delicious pizza and pasta and along with Spiriteca (importers of incredible whiskey and other rare spirits), was one of the most enjoyable build-ups to a job I have ever experienced! 

Now there are probably a lot of things about PizzaExpress that you don't know. Firstly the company was started when Peter Boizot went to Italy in 1948 and saw real Pizzaolas tossing dough in the air for the first time in his life. He vowed to bring this Italian tradition back to England with him and succeeded in doing so in 1965 with a Pizza oven from Rome and a chef from Sicily. 

Another thing you may not know is that PizzaExpress has been a major supporter of jazz music since they started doing jazz performances at their Dean Street location in London in 1969. Some of the jazz greats that have been featured there are Ella Fitzgerald, Amy Winehouse, Norah Jones and Jamie Cullum. 

And did you realise that PizzaExpress is helping to prevent Venice from sinking? In 1977 they created the Pizza Veneziana and from then till today a percentage of every one sold goes to the Venice in Peril Fund. 

You get the idea - it's an interesting company that does some unexpected stuff. 

Back to our little project. So the mandate was quite straightforward - make a beautiful video that captured the various key elements of PizzaExpress: the location, the design and art which they support, the commitment to high quality super fresh ingredients, the pursuit of the most traditional Italian ways of pizza preparation, the fun, relaxed atmosphere and of course most important - the customers! 

Well a lot to pack into a short 1.5 minute video, but I think we did a pretty good job of it! And by the way, we also created the 3D animated version of their logo at the top of this page :-)

Check out the final video we made here: 

Spiriteca - Some of the Greatest & Rarest Whiskies in the World

A few months ago, I was very lucky to come across a very interesting opportunity indeed. I was introduced to the head of Hong Kong's leading importer of rare and top-quality whiskey for a marketing and PR consulting job. Now, for anyone who knows me well you will definitely know that I am a HUGE fan of good whiskey and suddenly having the opportunity to work with and taste some of the best whiskies in the world was like a dream come true! 

The job description was pretty interesting too - they had recently been offered a space for a 3 month pop-up store in The Landmark, one of HK's oldest and most exclusive shopping malls, and they wanted to bring me on board to spread the word on this exciting first in Hong Kong. Needless to say I enthusiastically said "yes!". 

The first thing we decided to get to work on was a launch party to welcome in existing and new customers, so we booked the date, sent out the invites and off we went! Here are a few snaps of the party so you can see how it went: 

Drinks were very popular!

Sniff and sip

Lots to choose from

Golden liquid

Tasty canapes

Discussing the drinks

Me & Next Media Crew

Sean Fitzpatrick of Tatler Group

As you can see from the pics the event was a great success and the final result of all this fun and merriment was a lot of empty bottles of whiskey, vintage rum, cognac and more, as you can see here:

After the success of the launch event, we still had a lot to do to make sure that the 3 months in prime retail space would be maximised. After a bit of thought we decided that we should orgnanise a special "Get in the Spirit Walk" to take place throughout the gentlemanly location of Landmark Men. In order to make sure it would be a great success we decided to reach out to a series of partners who could help make this a great experience for the modern gentleman. The partners who came on board were: Thomas Hardy, Tassels, Gentleman's Tonic, The Armoury, Kelly & Walsh, Vero and Thomas Pink. The idea was that the shops would open much later into the night than usual and you could follow a trail around Landmark Men, stopping in each of these sophisticated stores to enjoy a dram of a different spirit, whilst doing so you would also collect a stamp from each location and at the end could enter into a lucky draw to win quality prizes supplied by each partner - what's not to love about all that?

Here is the final map that we put together for our Get in the Spirit Walk:

As you can imagine we had great feedback from this event, but it still wasn't the end of all the fun things we had up our sleeves! 

To keep the excitement and interest up throughout our whole tenure, we decided to set-up a free tutored tasting every Saturday and Sunday afternoon between 2pm & 5pm. This meant that every weekend we would open up a few really special bottles and you could just drop in any time after lunch to try several of the best whiskies you had ever tried in your life and get educated in their background, history and tasting notes. Lots of fun - I attended several of the sessions myself! 

There were still several other things that we set-up during our time in the Landmark and all of them were very enjoyable for us and hopefully for everyone who visited us too. And to see how successful the whole project was, check out some of the flattering articles we got in the press below: 

HK Magazine

HK Tatler 

Hip Hong Kong

The List

And you'll be happy to know that the story hasn't come to an end just yet! I've been talking to the guys at Spiriteca again recently and seems they have the next exciting plan already in action behind the scenes. Keep your eyes peeled! 

About Spencer Douglass

Mobile World Congress (MWC) with ALCATEL

Mobile World Congress or MWC as it is commonly known, is the world's largest mobile trade show held in March every year. In 2013 over 65,000 people flew in to take part in the event and over 1,500 mobile or mobile related companies exhibited at the event. As you can imagine it was quite a show and I was lucky enough to be flown over myself to help oversee the global PR campaign from mobile phone designer and producer ALCATEL. 

The event was held at the striking modern Fira Gran Via building which you can see here: 

 In the incredible, historical and picturesque city of Barcelona in Spain:

Lots of advantages of attending a conference in Barcelona - one being the incredible architecture and sights and another being the amazingly delicious food, which I've put a few examples of here: 

Well enough about the wonderful food, incredible environment and vibrant history of Barcelona (I didn't even touch on the football team...) how about the event itself? Well it was an enormous success for ALCATEL ONE TOUCH. We launched 6 brand new smartphones, which added to those we had previously announced at CES brought the grand total to 13 smartphones launched since January 2013. This very impressive feat, as well as the high quality and beautiful design of the new phones caused a large stir in the press and in all we counted over 2,000 articles about us in the press over the course of MWC.

The beautifully designed phones launched at MWC included the ONE TOUCH Star shown in Cranberry Pink here:

In addition to all the press excitement around the impressive new range phones, I also got my own little press buzz when someone recognised me in the background of one of the product videos as one of the hosts of Crazy from Kong - my youtube show where we review crazy Asian snack foods like Wasabi Kit Kat and Self-Freezing Coke. 

The video was a review of the Idol X by The Verge. I've put it below and if you go to the youtube page you will see the comments referring to me and my show: 

About Spencer Douglass

Consumer Electornics Show (CES) with ALCATEL

I get to do lots of fun things in my life and this was a pretty new one for me, as I recently got flown off to Vegas to attend CES (the world famous Consumer Electronics Show) by ALCATEL ONE TOUCH as their representative for global PR. The show is pretty awesome and a big deal in the world of gadgets as it is generally the place where everyone from TV to camera to computer to car companies come to launch their latest and greatest products.

That is exactly what we were there for too - to launch a whole series of cutting-edge new smart phones. My job was to make sure that the message got out to the press and considering somewhere in the region of 400 articles appeared online, I believe the press did indeed receive the message and were very interested in the new line-up of ALCATEL ONE TOUCH smartphones!

One of the showcase products we got to announce at CES was the world's slimmest smartphone - the ONE TOUCH Idol Ultra - measuring in at a mere 6.45mm thin. You can check out Engadget's review of the phone below:

About Spencer Douglass