Four television commercials featuring a series of new Nestlé Mio baby products have just been shot in Malta for Nestlé Italiana and are due to be aired later on this year.

The four commercials shot last week are being produced by Malta Audiovisual Production, a company set up in Malta in September of last year by three production houses from Milan with the assistance of Malta Enterprise and the Ministry for Investment, Industry and Information Technology. The aim of setting up MAPC was specifically to promote Malta as the ideal location to shoot television commercials including the benefits enjoyed, namely experienced personnel, resources and facilities available, proximity to Europe and favourable weather conditions.

For the shooting and production of these commercials, MAPC, which specialises in high definition filming, engaged the experienced British director Simon Cheek whose forte is the filming of spots that require the conveying of imagery, story telling, comedy and that involve children and dialogue. Cheek has also done commercials for the automotive industry.

Michela Giordana is the producer of these commercials while the director of photography is Luca Robecchi. They are both being assisted by a large Maltese team led by production manager Simon Sansone, assistant director Pierre Ellul and Art director Ino Bonello. The team worked on a storyboard designed by Agency Ogilvy of Milan for Nestlé Italiana.

Nutrition has been a cornerstone of Nestlé since Henry Nestlé founded the company in 1867. He was a chemist driven by scientific investigation into child nutrition and his first infant formula was created to save the life of his neighbour’s child, a premature baby, who was unable to breast feed and was suffering from malnutrition. Today Nestlé has the world’s largest and most respected R&D team in the nutrition industry with 3,500 people working to find specific solutions for complex nutritional needs, thus ensuring that Nestlé Nutrition products are world leading.

The four TV commercials shot in Malta for this important category for Nestlé are a start to a hopefully long and mutually beneficial relationship between this big multinational and the audio visual industry in Malta, which to date is still in its infancy but promises to grow into a viable and profitable industry.

Other facts related to shooting of TVC in Malta:

• The main cast includes a nutritionist, a number of mothers (four in each advert) as well as babies ranging from the ages of six months to three years.

• The casting for the featured mothers and nutritionist was done in Milan, Bologna, Rome, Buenos Aires and Malta, however a final decision was eventually taken by the client to use Italian actresses since they all had speaking parts.

• Casting for babies was done in Malta. Response was excellent as over 120 applications were received. As the shooting was postponed a few times and in the meantime the babies obviously grew, the casting process had to be repeated.

• Choice of featured babies and mums was made by the director, Nestlé Italiana as the client, and by Agency Ogilvy in Milan.

• The featured babies are all Maltese

•An extra 40 Maltese mothers and 40 Maltese babies were cast

• Total number of other crew was 45 and these were primarily Maltese.

• The sets for the different commercials were designed and constructed by Ino Bonello

• The commercials were shot two days on set at Studio 7 and 2 days on location in private houses.