Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Live
Client: Smart Entertainment
Project: Hitchhiker’s Live (London)
Location: London, UK
Deliverables:
1x Hero 50 second EPK (Social, Web and Press)
1x Hero 50 second EPK with reviews (Social & Web)
1x Hero 30 second EPK (Social, Web and Press)
1x Teaser trailer (30 seconds) (Social & web)
1x Press Night Video (Social)
Window Zebra did:
Ideation
Pre Production
6 full days of filming across the show’s rehearsals and core performances
Directing
Editing & Grade
Key shoot takeaway:
Dom was able to live his childhood dream, working on a show that he wrote his dissertation on at University. He maintains he was the biggest Hitchhikers fan in the room at any moment.
The Brief
Smart Entertainment were in the middle of developing a new live Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy show at the Riverside Studio in London in late 2025 and needed a production team who could create an eye-catching video marketing kit, unique to the live format.
This would include a behind the scenes look at every stage in the process from the initial full-cast read through, to the final performances with live audiences.
The creative look and feel of the final videos, that was completely up to us!
Pre Production
Working with Smart entertainment, we were able to see the show take form from the initial rehearsals in the studio space and the outlined set build right through to the final performances.
Throughout the entire process, we were thinking about the core elements of the story that we needed to capture and how we could best portray these on screen. This also included a full storyboard and scripting process needed for some of the voiceover later on.
Once everyone was onboard, we were off to the… spaceship?
The core crew consisted of:
Director / Producer
DOP
1st AC
Marvin the Paranoid Android (although he wasn’t much help)
And that was it. It wasn’t a large production but with a lot of planning upfront, we were able to move through most of the creative with ease.
We shot this EPK on our RED Komodo X with a mix of Sigma zooms and Canon Prime lenses for 75% of the shoot. The other 25% was on our RED Gemini for some particularly good low light performance in some of the darker audience rooms. Most of the BTS social content was captured on our Sony FX6.
Production
The series of films was shot over a period of about 6 weeks but the EPK was split into two shooing blocks. As the show was a ‘live event’ the goal was to capture some of the performance with the full sized crowd, to capture real-time reactions, and then come back for a 2nd day to capture the other storyboarded elements with additional lighting and more time to focus on the honing the tricky shots.
Post Production
As the project was shot over multiple blocks we were able to deliver each individual element quickly over the course of the campaign. Each shooting block was core to element we needed to capture, but as we went through the process, we were able to capture different content as the show changed and progressed, which further allowed us to change and adapt the deliverable content to make it fresh for new audiences.
All post production on all elements from edit and grade to audio and graphics was completed in-house for better flexibly for quick ‘social’ edit timelines.
