A young brand has one problem that established brands never think about. Few people know it, and every piece of communication has to work with almost no trust in the bank. ROCK Mutual Insurance had been set up a few years earlier, but most of Lebanon had never heard of it. When the brand prepared its first advertising campaign in 2026, the films had to do that job in thirty seconds each.
This is how we produced the campaign, from the brief to the fifteen social cut-downs, and what it says about how a production house takes on a campaign when one team carries video and photography together.
The brief
ROCK Mutual Insurance is a Swan Group company, built on more than thirty years of mutual insurance experience through its sister company, CML. Spearhead, the agency, led the brand strategy and identity. Fine Line was brought in to execute all the video and photography for the campaign.
The scope had three parts:
- Four commercials, one for each line of business: Expat, Motor, Property and Health.
- The corporate and product photography for the brand.
- An internal campaign of employee stories, plus a closing address from the company's founder, to bring ROCK's values to its own team before the public saw the campaign.
That last part is easy to underestimate. A company advertising on people-centric, transparent values has to convince its own staff first. So the internal material went out ahead of the campaign's public launch, not after it.
The idea: leave the brand in the background
Insurance advertising has a house style. Confident voice, clean offices, a family smiling at a signature. We went the other way.
All four films trade polished advertising for a documentary, found-footage feel. The camera behaves like a phone or a bystander rather than a crane. The brand stays in the background throughout: a ROCK counter in the corner, a policy on a phone screen, never in the middle of the frame.
Each film takes one line of business and fills it with specific people:
- Expat follows a domestic worker reassuring her daughter on a video call, a professional signing on at a new job, and a delivery driver waiting anxiously in an emergency room until he is told everything is covered.
- Motor moves through a young man checking a used car with a mechanic friend, a teenager getting her first hatchback, and a couple testing an SUV for a growing family.
- Property runs from newlyweds settling into a Mar Mikhael apartment to an older couple in their neighbourhood minimarket and two entrepreneurs opening an agency.
- Health sits with a student paying his own policy out of a part-time job and a daughter reassuring her mother in a hospital.
One line ties the four together: every story deserves protection. Because the films are built from small, specific moments rather than claims about the product, the line arrives as a summary of what you have just watched, not as a slogan you are asked to believe.
Four films, one cast, two shoot days
The four commercials were shot back to back in two days, with a shared cast and a shared tone, so they play as one campaign rather than four unrelated spots. Shooting them together is what made the found-footage style hold: the same light, the same texture, the same people moving through the four stories.
Behind the two days was a full crew. Fidele Hage directed. Hasan Salame, our co-founder, was the cinematographer. Tatiana Abiantoun line-produced, and Said Halawi, our managing partner, was executive producer. Around them: an assistant director, a focus puller who also graded the films, a sound engineer and boom operator, an art director, a stylist, hair and make-up, and a production coordinator. Equipment came from Millimeter, a Beirut rental house.
The point of listing the crew is not the credits. It is that a two-day shoot for four films only works when every department is planned to the hour, and that planning is the producer's job, not the client's.
Beyond the commercials
The corporate and product photography was shot for the brand alongside the films, which is how photography runs on most of our projects: part of the same production rather than a separate booking. One team, one look across the website, the print material and the ads.
The internal campaign captured ROCK's employees telling their own stories, closed by the founder's address. This material was designed to do something the public films could not: show the people who were about to answer the phone what the brand they were joining actually stood for.
After the shoot: fifteen cut-downs
A campaign does not end with four thirty-second films. It ends with everything those films become on social media. After delivery, we edited fifteen additional cut-downs of the campaign in vertical and horizontal formats, so the same stories could run as reels, stories and feed posts on every platform without cropping a horizontal film into a vertical hole.
Planning for this from the start changes how you shoot. Framing that survives a vertical crop, moments that work in six seconds, and a line that still lands when the sound is off.
What this project shows
ROCK is the clearest example in our commercial work of what a full-service video production company in Beirut can take on when one team handles the whole execution of a campaign: the shoot, the photography, the internal films and the delivery, with the agency owning the strategy and identity.
For a client, that means one point of contact and one look across everything. For the films, it means the corporate photography, the commercials and the social cut-downs were all made by people who were on the same set, in the same light, on the same two days.
See the ROCK Mutual Insurance film page for the Expat film, or the commercials page for all four spots side by side.
Talk to us
If you are launching a brand, a product or a service in Lebanon and need the films, the photography and the social versions produced by one team, tell us the brief and we will tell you what it takes.