Makan Bersama ALIF Raya TVC is Experts’ Choice

A family that lives together should eat together.

With everyone working and learning from home, rooms and spaces have turned into offices and classrooms. We are all living/working under one roof, but we are not together under it. We are all so caught up in our own thing that we no longer communicate or even eat together.

As a cooking oil brand, we want Alif to remind people of the importance of having meals together as a family because the dining table is the heart of a home and, by extension, the community too.

When we Makan Bersama, it allows us to talk, laugh and share our day- a proper time to catch up and communicate, allowing us to reconnect, and that is why we need to bring people back to the dining table. That is the idea behind Makan Bersama.

So what happens when you try to shoot a Raya TVC that wasn’t supposed to be a Raya TVC in the first place during a pandemic?

You get a perspective change and a humbling experience.

This TVC was supposed to be a brand film slated for an earlier release just after CNY 2021 to set the tone for our new thematic campaign for the year, which was Bersama Alif.

Due to the uncertainty of how the COVID-19 pandemic was progressing, we decided to make sure that we took our time to cover all bases in ensuring that we had an SOP-compliant shoot where the safety of every person on set was our priority.

We also had a backup plan to turn this into an animation if the authorities denied our request to shoot on location.

While working around scheduling conflicts, approvals from the authorities, and other unforeseen circumstances, we advised the client to go for a Ramadan/Raya release instead. Makan Bersama Alif would not work as animation. The client agreed. So we rewrote the script again to fit the Ramadan release, which turned it into a Raya TVC!

Days later, we got the green light to resume production as planned. All of us couldn’t have been happier! Everything was falling into place, so we began pre-production. Five days before the shoot, we all went for our swab test, and everyone was cleared. Fantastic, we’re well on our way!

We spoke too soon.

Three days to shoot, our Executive Creative Director (ECD), who also happens to be the person who had written the script, had to be quarantined due to close contact with a COVID-19 positive person.

His wife.

However, there is a quote by Drew Westen, the founder of Westen Strategies:

“The Road To Victory Is Paved With Emotional Intention."

And why this quote is so fitting is because this was indeed a labour of love. All the parties involved were not willing to compromise on how we would tell the story of Makan Bersama. So we endured the challenges the new norm threw at us, and we carried this baby to the victory line for the love of the brand.

So congratulations again to our client Alif on this accolade, our production partner Mastermind Group for your continuous support and passion and, of course, to our very own S+Perts on a job well done and a Experts’ Choice Award feather in your hat.

To find out more about our services, contact bizdev@symonpatryck.com.