In the thick of COVID, Travelocity faced a hard problem: how does a travel brand sell travel when no one is going anywhere? Working with Austin agency Proof Advertising, Camlock Films — an Austin video production company — helped answer it with a holiday campaign built around the brand's Roaming Gnome and a "stay home for Christmas" angle, spotlighting the staycations travelers could still book on Travelocity. We handled the full scope from pre-production through delivery: four :15 spots that ran as pre-roll on Hulu and other streaming services. The whole thing came together on a lean $40K budget and a single shoot day.

The first real decision was studio versus location. A warm, wood-paneled holiday interior — the kind of rich-mahogany coziness the spots needed — wasn't available on budget as a practical location, so we made the call to build. The advantage of our subject made it viable: because the hero was a small gnome prop, we didn't need to construct a cavernous room to sell a grand, intimate space. That let us pour almost the entire budget into the Art Department, where Production Designer Joscelyne Ponder built a set that punched far above its cost and carried the campaign's entire look.

Shooting at Aduro Studios in Austin — masked up, as the era demanded — we engineered the day for maximum output. The key was reusing a shared intro shot across all four spots, which freed enough time to shoot four finished pieces in one day rather than stretching the schedule and the budget. The Roaming Gnome was a practical prop that stayed mostly stationary, with a few gags that required carefully moving him around the set. We shot on an ARRI Alexa Mini with Cooke lenses, using the iris to turn the set's Christmas lights into octagonal bokeh — a small, deliberate touch that gave the holiday glow real character.

The result was a tight, four-spot streaming campaign that solved a genuine budget-and-pandemic puzzle through smart art direction and disciplined planning, not extra spend. That problem-solving is what makes Camlock Films a reliable production partner: Proof producer Kate Chartier has brought us work several times in the years since. For agency creatives and producers looking for an Austin production company that makes a modest budget look like a much bigger one, that's the standard we hold.