Australia Tourism Turns to User-Generated GoPro Films for New Year’s Eve Bash

Over 1.5 million New Year’s Eve revelers in Sydney Harbour last week watched six short GoPro films of surfers, skateboarders and zoo animals projected on the 250-foot-high columns supporting Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Tourism Australia and the City of Sydney worked with social media influencers to produce the films, each created with miniature GoPro HERO4 cameras, at nearby locales such as Bondi Beach and Taronga Zoo.

The projections were designed to provide a taste of Tourism Australia’s upcoming global advertising campaign launching this month, which will focus on Australia’s aquatic and coastal travel experiences.

The City of Sydney also created the #SydNYE website and hashtag to drive additional buzz around what’s already the biggest spectacle of the year at the most iconic place in the country. Sydney always puts on a big New Year’s Eve show because it’s the first global city located at the beginning of the times zones chronologically.

“This for us again highlighted the power of user-generated content,” says Jesse Desjardins, global manager of social & content for Tourism Australia. “By giving our influencers a GoPro and setting them free, we were able to capture incredible content from the point of view of our audience, instead of the other way around, which is a big shift for destination marketing organizations.”

After the event, the website pulled in a bunch of user-generated social media content shared during the event to supplement the user-generated videos produced by Tourism Australia.

That’s the big concept here. It’s not so much that the municipal government and national tourist board developed a compelling visual experience in front of such a large captive audience.

The most interesting element is really how cheap it was to develop. Forget hiring a big name agency and film crew to shoot high production videos. Instead, give a kid a GoPro and a selfie stick and ask her to film a baby koala bear. It’s in-line with Tourism Australia’s long-term work on platforms like Instagram and Facebook that used user-generated content rather than rely solely on the work of professionals.

The entire project required only four weeks to produce from start to finish. Desjardins told us that the flexibility of the GoPros and the high resolution of the imagery helped speed up the production timeline.

“It’s not a question of quality anymore,” he says. “This exercise proved that even a small GoPro camera can produce quality video that can be projected on such a massive canvas. It’s a real game changer and an area that Tourism Australia plans to dominate in again this year.”

The short video of some of the GoPro footage projected on the bridge pylons is below. Click here for the full 13-minute video review of the entire evening.