Three Queenstown Scaffolding crew in hi-vis building the scaffold inside the voco Queenstown lobby, with the mountains through the glass

Client: Queenstown Scaffolding
Where: The lobby at voco Queenstown
What we did: A time-lapse of the build, an on-site interview and three vertical reels
Shot: One morning, Monday 19 October 2026

A scaffold in a lobby that never closes

The voco Queenstown lobby has a wall of glass that takes the afternoon sun. Queenstown Scaffolding were booked to put a scaffold up against it, so a crew could tint the windows. In Eli's words, it was "so the afternoon sun doesn't blind all the punters".

The catch was the clock. The hotel stayed open. The lobby was empty at 9am, and the scaffold had to be up and safe before the next guests checked in at 3pm. That was the story we wanted the videos to tell.

Six weeks of planning for one morning

None of it was improvised. Eli first measured the job about six weeks before, with lasers and levels, taking every height and length. The hard part was the hotel's glass entrance canopy, which the scaffold had to span. His answer was to truss over it.

That preparation is the part customers never see, and it became the spine of the second reel.

How we filmed it

We locked off a small time-lapse camera on the lobby from just after 9am and left it running until after 1pm, so the whole build would compress into seconds. A phone ran a second, wider time-lapse angle on the glass.

The main camera worked close and vertical: harness checks, clips going on, levels on the tubes, boards going up, the truck being unloaded outside. Between lifts we grabbed a couple of minutes with Eli on camera, asking how he planned the job and who was on the crew. Those answers became the voiceover and the captions. The crew carried on working the whole time, and we kept hotel guests out of the frame.

The voco Queenstown lobby from the time-lapse camera: the empty glass entrance before the build, and later the scaffold up and trussed over the canopy — The empty lobby just after 9am, and the scaffold up over the canopy after 1pm, from the time-lapse camera.

Three reels, one idea each

One morning of footage became three vertical reels, each built around a single idea:

Build in 30 seconds. The time-lapse, with an on-screen clock so you can watch the morning go by, opening on "Empty lobby. Guests at 3pm."
Done right. The planning and the safety: lasers and levels, the canopy problem, harnesses and a crew of ticketed scaffolders who have been with Eli for years.
A morning at voco. From the truck in the car park to the top lift, cut fast with lots of close-ups.

Every reel has burned-in captions, with key words picked out in the same lime green as the crew's hi-vis, and ends on a Queenstown Scaffolding card with the phone number and website.

Build in 30 seconds, the first of the three reels.

Fixing the windows in the edit

A glass wall with a bright Queenstown morning behind it is hard on a camera. Exposed for the crew inside, the windows blew out to white and the mountains disappeared. We shot in a log profile to keep as much of that detail as possible, then graded the window shots so the view came back while the interior stayed natural. The mountains through the glass are half of what makes it look like voco.

What comes next

The reels came first so Queenstown Scaffolding could start posting straight away. The longer hero film waits for the other half of the story, when the scaffold comes back down.

For the practical side of filming a trade job like this, see one morning, three reels. Our social media video page covers how we build reels for local businesses, and the Aluume floating sauna shows what longer build documentation looks like.

Queenstown Scaffolding at voco: a lobby scaffold between 9am and 3pm