Sports 2000. A German retailer, shot Glasgow + Skye.

Thomas Kettner, the Munich-based photographer leading the campaign, came to us in November. The work needed two visual languages in the same edit. Gritty, architectural, industrial. And raw, elemental, vast. He had Scotland in mind. We had a specific answer for it.

Glasgow paired with the Isle of Skye. On paper they're opposites. One is a post-industrial city with a character no studio recreates. The other is the most cinematically distinct coastline in Europe. Put together they delivered a visual range that doesn't exist in one place anywhere else on the continent.

Securing the right Glasgow locations takes more than a recce and a phone call. The production needed the SECC and the Armadillo, landmark architectural venues that are not routinely available for commercial shoots. We had the relationships and the lead time to lock them in.

City-centre drone work added another layer. Glasgow airspace authorisation requires coordinated CAA applications, ATC liaison, and precise flight windows. Without that pre-work, the day burns. With it, the unit moves.

The Kelpies sat alongside as a third anchor location. Three different scales of Glasgow industry inside the same week, with no day on the schedule that didn't already have a permit attached.

Skye operates on its own terms. Micro-climates mean conditions shift inside a single valley in under an hour. What's true on the west coast at breakfast may not hold by lunchtime. There is no point pretending otherwise.

Every evening, Thomas and the production team built the next day's plan. A, B, C, and D. So that whatever conditions emerged, a location and a creative approach were already ready. On days the Quiraing was buried in cloud, the unit was somewhere else, making images that only existed because of the weather, not despite it.

Weather monitoring started weeks before anyone flew into Edinburgh. Forecast data, translated into practical location decisions, so the unit arrived informed rather than improvising.

Approximately twenty crew. Two to four talent on set at any given time. Crew and cast composition shifted right up to the last days of pre-production. Not unusual on a campaign of this scale, but it requires accommodation, transport and logistics to stay genuinely flexible, not nominally flexible.

On Skye in season, quality accommodation books months out. The bookings stayed changeable and on budget throughout, renegotiated as the unit numbers shifted. When changes came at the last moment, the production absorbed them without financial penalty.

The part Thomas didn't have to think about while shooting was the weather, the locations, the access, or the bed for the night. He thought about the picture.