We filmed this really funny short film with New Year greetings which we sent out to various businesses that we liked. Maciek, the co-owner of Pan Tu Nie Stał, wrote back saying he was thinking about filming something for his brand. Not a commercial, not a promotional video, something that would show the company, but would also deliver enterntainment to it’s clients.

The company has a very active fan base. This is because Pan Tu Nie Stał doesn’t only sell clothes, they developed a whole vibe around their brand. The comapny is run by Maciek and his wife Justyna. We wrote the concept around Maciek and his daily “struggles” inside the company. Small problems spiraling out of control, to create often embarassing and overly complex akward moments.

We decided to include the real staff of Pan Tu Nie Stał, to play their original roles in the series. This way we had a thouroughly enterntaining concept which allowed us to show the full picture of this unique company.

To say this production was challenging, would be too simple. Even though we created detailed scripts, from the begining we knew, there would be alot of improv.

The concept is built on two layers.  It’s a mix of footgae in which Maciek is trying to present the company in a meaningful way, and a “behind the scenes” layer which records everything that happens once the original script starts to collapse. Imagine directing and filming two films at the same time. It was demanding.

We had to trust ourselves to instinctively capture everything we needed to get this to work. For the BTS cameras we hired professional TV camera operators, who are trained to film in a specific TV styled way. We gave them TV cameras. This was a perfect way to achieve substantial deferences between the aesthetic of the main “film” camera and the BTS bits.

We managed to film two episodes per day, and visited Pan Tu Nie Stał three times ending up with six great episodes.

The edit was done by award-winning editor Kosma Kowalczyk, who turned out to have (and use) his acute sense of humour to to push comedy into almost every scene. Sound mixes were done by Łukasz Sobolewski and Jakub Jereszyński. The animations included in the epsiodes were done by Pan Tu Nie Stał’s animator Patryk Grochowicki.

The series “Pretensje” was released on social media channels and was met with great reception by audience.