This week, the final episode of the reality series "The Bridge" was released on the Telia Play platform, revealing the winner of the project and the 20,000 cash prize. However, along with the final series of the project, a special documentary about how the international Banijay format project TILTAS was born in Lithuania has also been released and is still available for viewers to watch on Telia Play.
As always, for this special project, ELITAZ Creative House has engaged the greatest television and film professionals to bring their experience and skills to create a television product that meets the highest standards. For four months, the TILTO team was made up of a hundred professionals in their respective fields.
"For more than a decade, Creative House ELITAZ has been working with the leading international formats of television programme makers, which has helped us to accumulate valuable and unique experience in the production of high-quality content. The opportunity to bring one of the freshest global phenomena, The Bridge, to life in Lithuania has been an enjoyable creative challenge for our team. The new genre of the reality TV series added a special charm to the process - it was not only a record of life, but also a kind of social experiment in a cinematic clothing. We brought together the best professionals in our market, and the results of their work could be seen by the whole of Lithuania for months. We are proud that our work has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and has become yet another successful project in an international format," says Gediminas Jaunius, Chief Producer of ELITAZ.
The project, which was filmed in the summer, thanks to a huge team, became the first cinematographic reality series, where for the first time Lithuanian nature was shown from a different and unseen side, allowing us to see its magnificent beauty and power and to see its wonders up close. And although Lithuania's name is often heard in the context of the most beautiful forests, it was not easy to find a forest in the bosom of the lake that would not only conveniently enclose the newly established camp, but also allow the creative team of almost a hundred people to create the invisible side of the Bridge in a discreet way, next to the Bridge being built by participants. This special place was an organic fish farm in the forests of Žemaitija.
The filming location had several challenges - easy access to the water, privacy that would allow the participants to separate themselves from the outside world, and two banks - that would allow the successful construction of a 300-metre bridge. In a corner of nature untouched by human hands, a huge team set up the entire campsite - a main house with kitchen and dining room, a sleeping house for 12 people, a fireplace with a seating area, a construction site with all the necessary tools, outdoor showers and toilets, cables and special towers that created the perfect communication field for filming. A separate house was also built at a distance for the production team, who monitored the participants around the clock and meticulously worked on each series of the project.
Participants were provided with all the hand tools and materials needed for the job: 100 cubic metres of logs, 400 buoys and 4000 metres of rope. A total of 32 flares were fired and 96 smoke bombs were used during the filming.
During both the construction and filming, the huge team faced a number of challenges: to create a modern and advanced environment for filming without touching nature, to keep the beauty of the nighttime wilderness undisturbed by the bright lights of the lamps and the camera, to capture the lives and emotions of the participants unobtrusively, allowing them to show the real them and to cooperate with all the elements of the unpredictable Lithuanian nature. In addition to filming the reality of the participants, the filming professionals were also given another task - to show the nature around them from an angle that none of us had ever seen before. The team fulfilled this task to the full - the audience was delighted by the synchronised filming of Lithuania's changing nature, the enchanting forest wildlife and the breathtaking bird's eye views that showed how many colours our forest and water have.
You can see more about how the invisible side of TILTO was created and what the daily life of the entire creative team was like during the filming process in a special documentary series available on the Telia Play platform.
