Visa – Pyeongchang Olympics

Client: VISA
Event: Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Experience
Location: Pyeongchang, Gangneung and Seoul South Korea.
Activities: Visa Lounge, Caricatures, Perfume Making Workshop, Terarosa Coffee Tour, Nigerian Bobsled Team Greeting, Fortune Telling, Palace Visits, Korean Food Tour, Fine Dining & Gala at Four Seasons Seoul

Brief: VISA has been a major presence and sponsor of the Olympic Games since 1986. For the Pyeongchang winter games Visa created an exclusive lounge and itinerary for VIP visa members, clients and contest winners.

With guests and activities happening simultaneously in Seoul, Gangneung and Pyeongchang it was a massive endeavour to organize photographers to cover all the key events. Event Horizon was brought onto the team to cover the Visa VIP Lounge activities at the iconic Seamarq Hotel in Gangneung and Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul.

VISA’s photography objectives focused around capturing the event spaces, from the custom built installations, branding and collateral down to the staff, decor, food and drink. Just as important was the documentation of Visa’s VIPs, clients and contest winners enjoying the spaces and activities.

A unique aspect of this project was the production of cinema-graphs. VISA and Flixel (a company that provides the app creating cinema-graphs) asked that each photographer capture and create a few of these “moving images” at each event. This pushed us all to start seeing things from a different angle, namely, an angle which would allow for an engaging cinema-graph! Below are many examples.

The VISA Olympics project was one of the most demanding ever. Travel between Seoul and Gangneung (3 hours) , multiple venues, stills, cinema-graphs and image delivery at the end of each night meant long days and little sleep for the team but we pulled it off the client was thrilled with the results!

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