Helsinki Curious | FILM, PRODUCTION

Capturing the essence of Helsinki by people who have never visited.

When Miltton contacted us with the initial idea and concept of Helsinki Curious, we felt the spark instantly. We’re proud of our home city, so it was an honour to start crystalizing this concept together.

Finding the artists

We wanted to find three artists from the three selected cities, London, Berlin and Tokyo, who all represented different illustrations styles. They all needed to agree our terms of the campaign; they have not visited Helsinki, they would not be allowed to do any online research of Helsinki and they are available on the planned schedule and filming days.

We went through tens of artists on our shortlist before finding the chosen ones, which the agency and client also loved.

Aysha Tengiz, Jack Sacks and Takashi Nakamura ended up being the perfect trio, not only because how the artworks came to be, but also because of their personalities and presence on documentaries.

Visual approach

We approached this as it would be a Netflix docuseries in a length of a Youtube series. Easy to watch, visually interesting and fun. We combined the strong colourful graphic style with video footage filmed with both a cheap digital handycam and a high-end RED camera. End result is dynamic and playful, which is suitable and familiar for the target audience. We wanted Helsinki to feel modern yet warm, approachable and inspiring through the visual style of the documentaries.

Artworks

All of the artworks came out to be amazing and very representative of the “Helsinki vibe”. They all also have a seagul!

Artists described their creative process as one of the funniest and most rewarding ones during their professional career. Stories and details helped a lot in forming the image of Helsinki without any reasearch.

Launch event

Project was launched during the Helsinki Design Week at the “Sugar Cube” designed by Alvar Aalto in 1962.  All the artwork were presented in an exhibition and documentaries were played on a big screen. Over 25 international journalist joined the event and more than 3000 people visited the exhibition during the week.