ŌRA KING DOCUMENTARY
Our Story
From the Ōra King Salmon hatchery at the sacred site of Te Waikoropupū Springs, through to the vibrant plates of renowned chefs around the world, the journey of Ōra King intertwines people, cultures, and continents. It’s a story of adventure, culture, best aquaculture practices, passion, friendship and craftsmanship.
Our Story
The Full Documentary
About
The Film
Designed by, and created for the world’s greatest chefs, each year Ōra King puts New Zealand and its produce up on the world stage by flying chefs and industry professionals in from different corners of the globe to witness how provenance plays a hand in the product’s exceptional quality. From egg to plate, visitors are able to truly understand the incredibly complex and intricate process of breeding King Salmon here in New Zealand, hence the comparison of Ōra King to salmon as Wagyu to beef. However, with borders largely closed since 2020, the team looked at ways in which it could best replicate the familiarisation experience and teamed up with local Nelson production company, Lumiere, where the concept of the documentary was born.
This film is a must watch for anyone who considers themselves a foodie, cares about sustainability, or simply likes to be informed. It’s a creative combination of breath-taking scenery shot above and below the water, thought provoking conversations from NZ Aquaculture’s leading authorities and inspirational dishes from some of the best chefs in the world.
Deeper into Our Story
We know the power of a good story, but the challenge with this project was to inspire the viewer as well as present a tonne of information in the process. Lumiere worked on a pitch to Ōra King and began work on their most audacious project to date. Over the next 6 months the team worked through pre-production elements which included a lot of research, phone interviews, emails, meetings, location scouting, scheduling of production days, coordinating with multiple staff and contractors, which led us into 19 production days across the South Island.
We conducted over 30 interviews with staff, chefs and third party industry experts, filmed in 11 different locations locally with a focus on the 4x NZKS sites. In addition to those production days we also re-organised all the footage we’d collated from filming various projects for Ōra King over the past 2 years as well as sourcing additional archival footage from around the world. In total we have 25.88TB of data which is certainly making our server work a little harder than normal.
Once production was wrapped, the enormous task of post-production / editing began. Each of the 30+ interviews were transcribed then handed over to Director – Joshua to make sense of all the raw footage in the edit suite. Over the next 60+ days, the raw footage was shaped into the beautiful story of what is now ‘Ōra King – Our Story’. The beauty of this project is we now have a massive archival library to pull from for future projects as well as this long form story.
The Stats
TB Footage
Production days
Loctions
Days of post-production
Hours of footage
Interviews
Months of work