Discover Our City
It's more than you might imagine
Let's celebrate Inverness
Inverness is known for being a tranquil Highland location, which if this is what you are looking for, it can be that. But what you maybe don't know is Inverness is a vibrant, community-driven, welcoming and inclusive city. The perfect blend of Scottish tradition and culture, that we are very proud of, combined with new and exciting experiences to be enjoyed when visiting.
Creating the "Discover Our City" video was all about showcasing the fact a destination is always more than you might imagine. Showing you something different from what is expected and that no matter who or where you are in the world you will always find a connection and feel welcome to our beautiful city.
Let us show you how it was brought together, some behind the scenes footage and celebrate all the local businesses, groups and societies who contributed to show you why Inverness should be number one destination on your Citybreak bucket list!
The video storyline was created and directed by Firth Studio who were the makers of our last video Discover our Stories.
The approach was to create a completely different tourism video with a fun spin including local businesses, local references, featuring lots of locals themselves, and creatively showing you why Inverness thrives on tourism and is a wonderful city to live, work, play and of course visit!
We (Visit Inverness Loch Ness) are a Tourism BID and a big part of our role is to market the destination to a world wide audience to encourage them to visit. This video is showing a snap shot, albeit with a humourous twist, of putting a promotional campaign together.
Fun fact : some of the team in the video are actual Visit Inverness Loch Ness team members and some are actors... we'll let you guess who!
The locations
We filmed in 12 locations around Inverness over 4 days.
Inverness Creative Academy
Ness Walk
Greig Street Bridge (wobbly Bridge)
Inverness Airport and Logan Air
Huntly Street
What was the best way to showcase everything we have to offer?
..... A parade!
The storyline shows how the team sourced people, places and content for the grand finale which is a celebratory parade along the River Ness.
Fun Fact : We only had a window of 3 weeks to gather everything for filming, including rounding up over 100 people from 18 different businesses, groups and societies for the parade and organising the road closure for when we filmed (thank you to the Highland Council for their support!)
It was a busy July evening and the crowds gathered around to watch the parade and to find out what was going on! Included in our celebratory parade were the following :-
Heading the parade and representing pipe bands was the wonderful Inverness Royal British Legion Pipeband
The Highland dancers from Cheryl Heggie School of Dance danced their way up and down the street on the many takes we took.
Walking tour tourists were lead by Cath from Walk Inverness
Showcasing the local well known delicacy "The Dream Ring" was a few of the Harry Gows Bakers team.
There was lots of local sports representation, including the Scottish sport of shinty with players from all the different teams involved with Inverness Shiny club. They walked along side the Highland Rugby Club and the Inverness Lions Basketball club. We also had a team of outdoor locals showing the diverse range of outdoor activities are on the doorstop of Inverness, including Cycling with 42 Cycling, local paddleboarders and wild swimmers, golfers and the back of the parade was the cool Landrover from Goya Adventures.
The team from Culloden Battlefield dressed up in the traditional costumes to represent our huge historic connections in Inverness.
The colourful flags gave the parade a carnival feel with thanks to the LGBTQI community and adding to that colour was the amazing Yee's North of Scotland Lion and dragon dance team.
Always expect the unexpected..... alpacas are the new Highland coos.... not really but they are becoming a much loved an visited feature here in Inverness and fitted well with the messaging that our city has more than you might imagine theme! Thank you to Invercannich Farm who kindly bought bronze and shadow along to be in the parade!
Discover our city - Discover Inverness
If you are inspired to visit Inverness, let us help you with some useful links to discover more and to help you plan and book a visit!
Where to stay - All the options for every budget and requirement can be found in our accommodation section
What to do - You will need to extend your visit as you will never fit everything in!
Where to eat - Let your taste buds do the discovering, check out all the local food and drink options.
Inspiration - take a look at our discover hub where you will find an abundance of blogs and articles on what you can see and do in the city!
More behind the scenes
A huge thank you to all of the local businesses, groups, societies and residents that helped us put this together.
