It's not the first time we work with Immers. Before that we've made several animated videos for their service. This time the task was more difficult: shooting a video in a store that's situated in the United States. Real western boots store. And the boots weren't the problem, but the distance was.
We came up with a script and, just like we Russians do, started thinking about how to shoot it so there is no extra spent for the client and no need for us to travel to the United States, which is basically the same. We tried to play out the script in our place and provided the client with a solution in which we shoot part of the video here and the client shoots a very small part in the store using no more than a smartphone.

A beautiful evening in Udmurtia and a beautiful morning in Dallas, a client calls and says that one of the employees has a good friend who's a Hollywood director(and he kind of is one) and they will shoot with him. Our project manager wasn't happy about it, but as it turned out later, the client doesn't want to break the agreement, that's a great example for our Russian clients to learn from, and will give us all the footage for cutting, animation and tracking.
The "Hollywood" director, whose name is NORRY NIVEN, has made it very easy for himself by radically rewriting our script. We were able to discuss some key points via Skype and he was already planning shooting on the next day.
It's hard to tell if the whole Hollywood commercial industry is like that, but our director was doing everything on a hunch. Spoiler alert, the footage we'd received didn't match the script, but you won't notice it in the work.

No casting. Norry just said he had a married couple of actors
who happened to have some free time in their busy schedule. It's worth noting that Norry as a director had his own professional team, and they were ready to film very quickly. Some shooting preparation moments were very similar to those described by Alexander Rodnyansky in his book "The Producer Appears" where he compares film production in the United States and Russia.

They were shooting on Arri Alexa and the footage weighed 200 GB, so the next issue was file transfer. It never seemed to be a problem, but there were some difficulties.

Google search offered various articles that described a lot of file transfer options; I will describe only two of them:


Dropmefiles
https://dropmefiles.com/
Dropmefiles advantages: no registration and hidden conditions.
Disadvantages: the need to divide the material into 4 parts, since the service works only with files up to 50 GB, and the terribly slow speed of both loading and downloading. I had to refuse this service.

Takeafile
https://takeafile.com/
This is a direct file transfer service with no restrictions on direct transfer between devices. There is only one advantage — no restrictions. Nope, they also have cool wallpapers on the website that are loaded from Behance.
The disadvantage is that both computers must be online all the time to transfer the file. And the client's laptop kept going to sleep, so the transmission was interrupted. All attempts to teach the client the hibernation settings weren't successful. This option was also abandoned. And by the way, the speed there also was far away from being great.

If we would continue searching for a proper file transfer service, it could affect our reputation in the eyes of the client. So we bought a subscription to Google Drive, which solved all our problems in less than 2 minutes and cost 219 rubles. If we'd known earlier, we wouldn't have spent time on those services.

We received the footage and started watching it. It became clear that they were shooting by feel and not according to the script. Only the text was exact match. Although it's worth thanking Norry, whose team made the draft, so that we would understand his idea. However, it turned out that the footage doesn't fit client's requirements.

A long and hard work had began. First we'd put everything together according to the draft and just attached screenshots to agree on this point. We know from previous not so pleasant experience that it's better to agree on everything that can be questioned. No, we're not blindly following our clients' instructions, but experience shows that if you can agree on something, it's better to do so.

The project wasn't difficult for us, but it was interesting and fun. There were some trouble with tracking illustrations in the smartphone and laptop shoots. It probably had taken the longest.

The project took exactly one month from the client's request to the final delivery.