TikTok Social Live Stream with Boots

Behind-the-scenes

The project

Boots re-launched their iconic makeup brand 17, targeted toward gen Zs, with a launch party at The Bike Shed in London with some of the capital’s best-known social celebrities and influencers. On the pink carpet, Tilly Ramsay hosted live from her TikTok channel, interviewing the guests, showing her 10.3 million followers around the party, taking a look at the new products, and chatting with the makeup artists.

The client’s top priorities:

Tilly Ramsay was Boots’ roving TikTok reporter, covering the event to help her virtual audience feel part of the exciting 17 launch. As a social live stream direct to Tilly’s followers on TikTok and on Boots’ Instagram feed, it needed to avoid looking overproduced to achieve the lo-fi user-generated look of TikTok.

Challenges & solutions:

There was no set start time with it being a party and not knowing when the guests would arrive, so we had to remain flexible and ready to start shooting once Tilly arrived and the party was in full swing.
We only had a short window with Tilly and the other contributors ahead of going live to coordinate and choreograph the flow of the live stream to ensure everyone was aligned as to what was happening when.
One of the biggest challenges was that our live stream team had to set up our MCR (master control room) outside of the event area so that the space could be utilised for the experiential part of the event. This meant we had to produce the live stream with wireless cameras and set up an antenna in the room so we could run the camera feeds back to our live production unit.
As it was a live party, it was very noisy, we had multiple crew members and camera positions, and repositions, which meant we had to communicate through IEMs (in-ear monitors) and microphones in order to facilitate communication between our live stream engineer, crew & talent.
We accommodated last-minute requests from the client and weaved these into the live stream filming.

Result

Social live streams are becoming more popular for brands looking to unlock the potential of new audiences through influencer marketing. Authenticity is one of the key drivers behind brands opting for a user-generated feel. In order to deliver this sort of lo-fi mobile phone feel, we shoot in the native format of the respective social channel e.g. 9:16 for TikTok & Instagram. Typically this takes a crew of 6-8 to help choreograph and coordinate the run of show. There’s a lot of cameras, sound, and live production equipment needed in order to produce this type of content, which we’ve tried to help illustrate in our BTS video above!

– Nick Forster, Co-Founder London Filmed

Professional, seamless and dreamy to work with! We worked with the London Film team for a talent-focused TikTok and Instagram livestream at the launch party of Boots own makeup brand, with the brief being specifically to make a produced stream feel user-generated. From start to finish the team were absolutely fantastic. The briefing process was incredibly easy, and the team were on hand whenever to answer everything from technical to logistical questions. The delivery of the stream itself was seamless, and the whole production team managed to put the talent at ease despite the loud and often challenging environment a party presents. Can't thank them enough for making the process so easy, and for being so flexible to ever-changing demands and last minute changes, and for a thorough and very helpful debrief that helped us to deliver our next livestreaming activation.

Martha Taylor, Content & Influencer Strategist, Ogilvy UK