10 November 2026

The day we filmed the Shake Locate advert

Shake Locate saves a place by shaking your phone. Explaining a gesture in words is hopeless, so we spent a wet winter day in the woods with a camera crew, a rented superhero costume and a wheelie bin. Behind the scenes photos, and the finished advert.

Filming in a wet pine wood: a camera operator behind a tripod, a sound recordist holding a boom pole with a rainbow umbrella gaffer taped to it, and an actor in a dark suit standing against a tree

Shake Locate is one of my side projects. You shake your phone, it saves the spot you are standing on, and you curate those spots into lists you can share. That is the whole idea, and it is almost impossible to explain in a sentence without the reader shrugging.

So we made an advert instead. It is on YouTube here. These are the photos from the day we shot it, which was one of the more enjoyable days I have had on a side project.

A wet day in the woods

It was winter, in Wales, and it rained from the first setup to the last. The entire rain cover operation was one golf umbrella, held over whichever bit of kit needed it most, and when both hands were busy it got gaffer taped to the boom pole. Wellies were the correct call.

Three of the crew standing on a wet driveway outside a cottage, one holding a folded rainbow umbrella, one checking the back of a camera, one holding a boom pole with the microphone wrapped in a plastic bag — The whole crew, and the whole rain plan.

The camera was a Blackmagic Cinema Camera on a tripod in the undergrowth, which on a grey December afternoon under a canopy of pines meant working at the edge of what the light would give you.

A Blackmagic Cinema Camera on a tripod in the woods, recording, with the monitor showing the shot and a yellow umbrella handle poking up behind it — Rolling. The umbrella is just out of frame, as it was all day.

Wally Man

The script called for a superhero. The budget called for lycra, a felt tip and somebody willing to stand in a kitchen in front of their friends wearing it.

He then spent a good portion of the afternoon standing in a wheelie bin outside a garage, which is a sentence I did not expect to write about a GPS app.

The superhero standing inside a green wheelie bin in a garage doorway while the sound recordist and camera operator film him from the driveway — Everyone keeping a straight face except the camera operator.

It was a proper production

Hair and makeup at the dining table, with the Christmas tree still up in the corner. Costume, continuity, a sound recordist, somebody making the tea. For a free app made by a small team, we took the silly thing surprisingly seriously, and that is exactly why it came out well.

Hair and makeup set up on a cottage dining table, brushes and products laid out, one person styling another's hair with a small Christmas tree in the background — Hair and makeup, the dining room, and a Christmas tree nobody had got round to taking down.

Why go to the trouble

A gesture is a hard thing to sell in text. You can write shake your phone to save a place as many ways as you like and it still reads like a feature list. Show someone doing it, in a daft story, and they get it in two seconds.

That is the real argument for making something like this. Not reach, not production value. Just that some ideas only land when you can watch them happen.

Watch the advert, or go and shake something.