SOFITEL. HALLMARK DATES
Project Overview
Client: Sofitel Hotels
Role: Photography & Creative Direction
Scope: Brand campaign imagery
Deliverables: Still imagery for multi-channel brand use
Location: Sydney, Australia
Markets: Australia & New Zealand
The Brief
Create a cohesive suite of imagery that aligned key hallmark dates with the Sofitel “Live the French Way” brand ethos, creating flexible assets for multi-market and multi-channel use.
The content needed to balance luxury and emotion while remaining adaptable across multiple regions, properties, and brand touch-points.
Campaign Occasions Covered
• New Year’s Eve
• Chinese New Year
• Valentine’s Day
• Melbourne Cup
• Mother’s Day
• Father’s Day
• Christmas
Valentine’s Day
EASTER
NYE
CHRISTMAS DAY
Challenges & Planning
The key challenge was delivering multiple creative concepts within a limited shooting window, while maintaining a consistent and elevated brand aesthetic.
Each location needed to support three to four distinct concepts, often involving multiple talent and set changes,
With multiple concepts and talent changes required in limited windows, careful planning and on-set coordination were essential.
This required careful planning, clear creative direction, and efficient use of time on set to ensure each scene was fully realised without compromising quality or brand alignment.
Role & Responsibilities
For this campaign, I led this project end-to-end — from creative concept and brand alignment through to production direction, photography, and post-production — ensuring a consistent visual language across all deliverables.
This allowed for a tightly controlled creative process and ensured consistency across all concepts, locations, and deliverables.
Creative Approach
The approach was to create a strong, recognisable visual language that could flex across multiple occasions while remaining consistent with Sofitel’s brand values of luxury, elegance, and joie de vivre.
Two Sydney properties were used as shooting locations and styled carefully to appear non-specific, allowing the imagery to feel globally relevant rather than tied to a single hotel.
Each scene was designed to feel cinematic, celebratory, and emotionally engaging, with a focus on moments rather than literal event representation.
Key Creative Decisions
Shot across two Sydney hotels, styled to feel brand-neutral and globally usable.
Developed a flexible visual system that could support multiple calendar moments
Balanced theatrical styling with polished restraint to maintain brand consistency
Designed bespoke sets where required, including a custom build for Valentine’s Day
Ensured all imagery aligned with Sofitel’s global brand tone and luxury positioning
DELIVERABLES
A comprehensive suite of imagery covering key hallmark moments across the calendar, developed for broad use across web, social, and brand marketing channels in Australia and New Zealand.
Outcome
The campaign delivered a versatile and cohesive image library that Sofitel could deploy across multiple markets and platforms.
The imagery was used across digital, social, and brand marketing channels, providing a consistent visual language across a wide range of seasonal and cultural moments.
The project required close collaboration across creative direction, production, and brand alignment, ensuring every element supported Sofitel’s premium positioning.
CLIENT FEED BACK:
“The brief was to produce a sophisticated and indulgent image series whilst conveying a sense of carefree spontaneity, encapsulating the brand’s differentiator — French joie-de-vivre.”
“…. detail-oriented, creative and easy to work with, and looked after the full shoot including creative concepting, production, engaging talent and crew, and post-production. I’d happily recommend them.”
Sofitel Brand Manager.
