The Making of Summer is Coming – the collaborative effort behind the award-winning project for the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk

If you’ve been keeping up with the TamGram, you recently read about the journey to launch our Summer is Coming video collaboration with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. From inspiration, to concept, to fruition, this project has thrived from the creative skills of everyone involved. And like all of our favorite projects, the story continues.

Initially, Summer Is Coming was going to be solely a social media campaign. But once the video came together, Marq Lipton, Vice President of Marketing at the Boardwalk, saw the potential for a theatrical presentation, and arranged for it to be shown in local theatres in Santa Cruz as well as in the Bay Area. Team Tam cut down the two-minute video to a thirty second spot so it could be aired on television – acting as a teaser to bring more audiences to the park’s website and Facebook page. The results were fantastic!

The Boardwalk launched the video on Facebook and YouTube, and Tam Communications shared it on Vimeo, YouTube, and other social media outlets as well. Once it launched on Facebook via the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s page, the native Facebook video was shared more than 1,700 times and aggregated more than 7,300 reactions. As of today it’s had more than 569,000 views, and growing. The video also gained more than one million Facebook impressions merely one week after the campaign launch, and the Boardwalk’s marketing team reported that the video had received more than 1,000,000 views online in that same week.

During production, we knew we were creating something that would garner a lot of attention. Boardwalk fans would love to see their favorite park emerging from the sand, as if by magic. Game of Thrones fans would appreciate the homage to the series’ opening sequence created by Angus Wall and company. And because of the incredible talents of Team Tam’s collaborators, we new there were industry accolades on the table as well.

The Summer is Coming video won gold in the 13th Annual W3 Awards, a competition celebrating digital excellence in video, social media, and video and marketing. We also received silver in the 2018 Davey Awards, recognizing work by independent agencies. Additionally the project collected two silvers and a gold award in the Cindy Awards, a premier audio-visual competition for both linear and interactive media. We hope to be reporting more accolades as this inspiring project continues to see the spotlight within the industry.

To further shed light on the skills, vision and long hours that our team put in, we created The Making of Summer is Coming to share the collaboration between us and the Boardwalk, and especially the work of the members of Team Tam. Susan O’Connor Fraser prepared the original flow and treatment, Tam O’Connor Fraser handled the music and sound effects, 3D Modeler and Animator Aaron Dingman and Art Director Mike Baxter continue to be heralded for their stellar work, and we join that chorus.