You’re a director/cinematographer. You’ve busted your butt in a faraway land completing a series of spots for a high-profile client. The campaign is a huge success, the client loves it and you’ve won prestigious awards. Do you sit back, relax and congratulate yourself on a job well done? Nope.

‘You always ask yourself, `How am I going to make it better this year?’ You can’t do something just as good. You have to do something better because the expectations are higher,’ says director/dop Robert Gordon.

This time around, something better meant heading to New Zealand for 10 days of shooting which could only be labeled ‘adventures.’ Camping out in the rough, climbing mountains and scaling glaciers – all in the name of selling beer.

‘One of the shots was on a glacier. We spent a day shooting down in an ice cave where you have to wear big, long, spiked shoes and carry an ice pick. It’s very physically challenging – you have to move up and down very slowly. It’s a 30-degree angle, and if you slip or go down into a crevice, they find you about a thousand years later. It’s pretty hairy,’ says Gordon.

An expansive on-location shoot like the one which produced Coors Light ‘Boundless’ is always unlikely to go off without a hitch. ‘Every time you do a major international shoot like that, there are always technical challenges,’ says Gordon. ‘We were constantly on the move across the country. We did some special effects work in the field, we did a lot of aerial work, work on the water, working with animals. Each of those things alone can be a problem on a shoot and we had them all to deal with.’

But one of the biggest challenges comes with trying to top yourself, especially when you think you might have already done your best work.

‘When you think that what you did before was really good, and you feel like you pushed yourself to the limit to accomplish that, you wonder if it can be much better,’ says Gordon. ‘But I think this year we actually managed to do that. It wasn’t a shoot for the faint-hearted, but I feel really good about it.’ TI