Sam Lynas

Fortunate to be a tourist-in-residence in Singapore for nearly two years whilst part of The Shophouse, the creative agency for Singapore Tourism Board.

Created over 100 pieces of weekly social content for Visit Singapore's social platforms: Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Grew the TikTok Community from from 150,000 to 1.8 million - the second most followed tourism board account in the world.

Part of the always on team creating content for Samsung Bespoke's global Instagram and Pinterest pages.

Working to an annual content calendar, my role was to research and download relevant assets from the existing database and then devise and present potential ways in for the creative team to build off.

Fortunate to work with Red Bull as part of their East Asia Content Studio at BBH.

Learned lots about audience habits in the region by creating thousands of pieces of social assets for the following markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan.

Our role consisted of utilising assets from the global Red Bull library and making them regionally specific whilst also considering best practise on social platforms.

This raised interesting challenges: how do you make snow sports relevant to markets where the climate is tropical?

Working with a small team made of creatives, makers, and content strategists, my role was the day-to-day account lead responsible for the success of the studio and ensuring we delivered creative excellence at scale.

We increased total video views by 54.7% and total reach by 66% after a full year on the account.

Our three year stint on the account coincided with the emergence of TikTok and we were fortunate to help grow the presence of Red Bull on the platform exponentially.

Developing content for Sentosa Development Company.

Sentosa was termed "The State Of Fun" and we certainly had a lot of it spending two years touring the Island looking for stories to share on the brand's Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram pages.

From paddle-boarding pooches, to real life mermaids, bungy jumping enthusiasts, waxwork cleaners, and elusive albino peacocks, we really covered it all.

My role was the day-to-day client leads for a small team of content creators, strategists, and creatives.

I was tasked with delivering creative excellence at scale: providing current and potential visitors to Sentosa with platform specific content that they actually wanted to engage with.

There was also the small matter of navigating and communication during a global pandemic. This I think the BBH team did particularly well, devising Virtual Sentosa - a multi-award-winning campaign in which the Island was recreated in Animal Crossing.

On this page have shared some of my favourite pieces of embeddable content.

The Military Grave Restorer is Steve Davies, who also happens to be my father-in-law.

Steve finds and restores forgotten military graves. Since 2021, I have volunteered my time to help him with his social strategy, content creation, and distribution.

As a result, I have developed an unexpected interest in graves and grave restoration.

Results:
- 6 million views of video content created
- 28,000 followers to date across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
- Featured twice on BBC Breakfast
- Over £20,000 donated to fund the restoration of further graves

To donate to the Military Grave Restorer, please click here.

Running Stories is an audio-tainment platform that turns your running routes into tailored immersive experiences.

Augmented audio enhances your surroundings by sourcing live data from open APIs to create a story designed to enter-train you.

The app uses your live location data, weather, your running speed and more to make you the main character in the story.

It's very cool.

I worked on business development for this app, shortlisting potential brand partners and developing presentations.

In addition, I was the lead producer for Episode Two - The Runner Without A Past.

Liaising with the developers, this involved a very healthy amount of running around Singapore learning about a secret agent who had lost his memory.

Inside Mirazur: The World’s Best Restaurant
Client: World’s 50 Best Restaurants
Role: Assistant Producer
Agency: Detail Films

Will and I travelled down to the South of France for a one day shoot with chef Mauro Colagreco and his incredibly talented team. The resulting film was used as part of the launch content for announcing Mirazur at the World’s Best Restaurant 2019.

Results:

- Over 260,000 YouTube views on the World’s 50 Best YouTube channel

Client: TOPJAW
Role: Producer and Director
Director of photography: Will Warr
Presenter: Jesse Burgess
Editor: Rob Ashton
Music: Brother Music

Produced to coincide with Songkran, we headed to Bangkok to film the latest in TOPJAW’s series of ’48 Hours’ in.

Results (correct as of Feb 2024):

- Over 445,000 YouTube views
- Over 2,000,000 minutes viewed
- Average view duration of over five minutes
- Featured by Secret LDN on Facebook with over 35,000 views

Inside Odette: The Best Restaurant in Asia 2019

Client: World’s 50 Best Restaurants
Role: Assistant Producer
Agency: Detail Films

I had the pleasure of joining Will Warr to assist with the production of this short film featuring Chef Julian Royer at his beautiful restaurant Odette in Singapore.

Results:
- Over 89,000 YouTube views on the World’s 50 Best YouTube channel

Client: Secret LDN, Gordon's Gin and Baileys
Role: Producer & Director
Agency: TOPJAW

TOPJAW partnered with Secret LDN, Gordon’s Gin, and Diageo to create a series of four dining guides to London.

After taking care of the budgeting and contracts, I helped choose the restaurants, write the scripts, liaise with the partners, organise the pre-production and also handle the post-production and distribution.

Results:
- Films were delivered on time and to budget
- To date, the series has been viewed over 250,000 across Secret LDN channels
- Episodes from the series have the first, second and third highest view through rate of any branded content across TOPJAW channels with other 65% of viewers watching to completion.

Client: smart
Role: Producer and Director
Agency: k-mb
Production team: TOPJAW

smart contacted TOPJAW about producing the second series of their online show: Challenge Accepted.

After taking care of the budgeting and contracts, I worked with the excellent team at K-MB based out of Berlin on refining the creative ideas. Once these were agreed with smart I looked after the end to end production for TOPJAW from concept to delivery.

Results:

- Three episodes and a teaser produced in London, Madrid and Rome.
- The films were delivered on time and on budget.
- Over 400,000 views on smart YouTube channel to date.

Client: Uber Eats
Role: Producer and Director
Agency: TOPJAW

Uber Eats commissioned TOPJAW to create a series of dining guides around the UK introducing partner restaurants. 

I handled the end to production for TOPJAW from coming up with the creative, choosing the locations and restaurants, putting time into research, script writing, handling the budget, account management and taking care of post production and delivery. 

Results:

- Three episodes produced in Peckham, Manchester and Hackney
- We also delivered behind the scenes photos
- Over 25,000 engagements produced from 1 million+ views on Facebook
- The success of this trial has lead to a broader series of content for Uber Eats in 2019
- Personally came to the realisation that Manchester is currently the best city in England for nightlife

TOPJAW founders Jesse and Will are two best buds two buds travelling the world documenting the best things to eat, drink and do.

I worked with them on:

- Channel development
- Business development (over £100,000 generated in 2018)
- Content ideas
- Content production
- Content distribution
- Community management and growth

Client: Aromat South Africa
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmakers:  Spilt Juice

I worked with the brilliant team at Spilt Juice on this TV commercial for South African Unilever brand Aromat.

My role was to analyse the treatments which were sent in by filmmakers across South Africa, working with our creative director on refining the treatments, presenting the treatments to the client, ensuring the film was delivered on time and on budget.

Results:

- Ran on TV in South Africa
- 650,000 views on YouTube
- I personally learned a lot about braai and the meaning of the word ‘lekker’

Client: The Glenlivet in partnership with World’s 50 Best
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmakers: Jake Viramontez & Detail Films

I worked with the World’s 50 Best and their partner The Glenlivet to create a three episode series titled Show Us Your Flavour. 

Worked with the extremely talented filmmaker Jake Viramontez to produce the video with Atelier Crenn and Estela and my good friend Will Warr of Detail Films who headed to Singapore to shoot Burnt Ends. 

Client: Shell
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmakers: TOPJAW

With just two weeks to the start of the Gumball Rally 2016, MOFILM was approached by Shell to create a series of content crowd sourced from the MOFILM network of 10,000 creatives. 

Working with Jesse and Will from TOPJAW for the first time, we also pulled in a number of influencers from the Foodiehub.

Results: 

- The 7 episode content series secured just under 1,000,000 million views to key markets in United Kingdom, Germany & Netherlands.
- The content featured key influencers from the motoring & food world with a combined online community of over 1.5 million followers.
- The total estimated reach of #ShellOnTheRoad branded content amongst the target audience was 4,500,000+

Pro Bono Client: #CookForSYRIA
Role: Producer & Director
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmakers: Detail Films

#CookForSYRIA is a global fundraising initiative curated by Clerkenwell Boy and SUITCASE Magazine in partnership with Unicef NEXTGeneration London. 

We made short films of five chefs taking part in the initiative and also captured the excellent launch party for the campaign.

It was brilliant to witness the generosity of the chefs and also the incredible organisational capacity of Tim (@ClerkenwellBoy). He deserves so much praise for being able to create a global movement in his spare time and raise over a million pounds for such a great cause.

We distributed the films of FOODIEHUB YouTube channel distributing them to over 250,000 people.

Will Warr from Detail Films was typically brilliant and kindly gave up his time to work on this project.

We handed the films over to the #CookForSYRIA team and it was brilliant to see them used by Channel 4, ITV and Sky News.

Chowzter was a food publishing start-up with the mission to connect the world through food.

Acquired by MOFILM in January 2015, it was relaunched as FOODIEHUB in the brand focussed multi-channel network MOSAIC.


Powered by the world's largest network of local food experts, I was responsible for sourcing, recruiting and managing 175+ talented creators from around the world including Clerkenwell Boy, Cheat Day Eats and Mark Wiens. We were probably the world’s first influencer agency for foodies without even realising it.

It was also a fantastic opportunity for me to work learn about producing video. We made over 100 non-branded films across documentary, comedy, animation, and travel with total views in excess of 15 million.

We also produced content across social media and grew the audience to 580,000+ across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. 


In addition, we organised awards and events held for the community in London, Singapore, Mexico City and New York City and were featured in The Guardian, Munchies and The Times.  


Sadly, all good things must come to an end and MOSAIC and FOODIEHUB were incorporated into MOFILM’s range of products in January 2017.

Big shout out to Jeffrey Merrihue for enabling so many unforgettable adventures in food.

Client: World’s 50 Best Restaurants
Role: Producer
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmakers: Pete Williams from Stay Gold

Ahead of the World’s 50 Best Awards 2015, we made two episodes: the first was a promo with the team from The Clove Club and the second was an event sizzle of the awards which we turned around in 24 hours.

Client: Paul Ainsworth
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: Barefoot Media
Filmmakers: PixelRain

Made in 2011, this was the first film I ever worked on that featured a chef commissioned by my favourite client of all time, Paul Ainsworth.

Paul is just unbelievably inspiring with great attention to detail.

He was a superstar then and he’s a superstar now.

Client: Asia’s 50 Best Rest Restaurants
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmakers: Ollie & Blair from Novemba Films

We travelled out to Singapore to produce a couple of films for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

The first was an event film which needed to be turned around within 24 hours.

The second was with David Thompson at his new restaurant Long Chim.

Role: Producer / Director
Channel: Foodiehub
Agency: MOFILM

In September 2015, I travelled to one of my favourite cities in the world to make a quick series with a small crew.

Thanks to the excellent suggestions and connections of Marta from Forever Barcelona we were able to gain access to some of the city’s most iconic restaurants including the world famous El Quim and the inspiration for London’s Barrafina, Cal Pep.

We were also one of the first teams to film in the recent opened Disfrutar for one of the most memorable dining experiences of my life. We confidently titled the film ‘The World’s Next Restaurant’ and am happy, but not surprised to see, the efforts of Mateu, Oriol Castro and Eduard currently sitting at #18 in the most recent list.

Special thanks for this series must go to my friend Michael McDuffie-Finlay who shot and edited this as a passion project.

Client: Guinness
Role: Agency producer
Agency: MOFILM
Filmmaker: Patrick Drake | The 60 Second Chef
Channel: Foodiehub

Worked with Patrick Drake of The 60 Second Chef to come up with this recipe film to celebrate St Patrick’s Day

Results:
- Over 2.5 million views
- One of the most viewed pieces of Guinness content online
- One of the top 10 most viewed pieces of content in Ireland

Client: Shake Shack
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: Sauce Communications
Filmmakers: Pete Williams from Stay Gold

In the Summer of 2013, I had the genuine pleasure of being part of the team that launched American burger chain Shake Shack into the UK market.

We shot a couple of videos over the launch which meant I had the opportunity to interview founder Danny Meyer and Randy Garutti.

A year later Shake Shack partnered with Massimo Bottura on a very tasty one off burger to celebrate the launch of his book and we were on hand to capture the day.

Shake Shack is one of my favourite brands in the world and are definitely on my bucket list to work together with in the future.

Client: Kaspar’s at The Savoy
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: Sauce Communications
Filmmakers: PixelRain

I was leading the digital and marketing launch plan for Kaspar’s at The Savoy and we worked with the chaps from PixelRain to create this short film featuring executive chef James Pare.

Personal highlight wasn’t captured in the film but was the friends and family night just before the launch when I was able to take my family along - allowing me to be able to say forever that I’d taken my Mum for dinner at The Savoy.

Client: Ametsa with Arzak Instruction
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: Sauce Communications
Filmmakers: PixelRain

I was leading the digital marketing strategy and implementation for the launch of Ametsa with Arzak Instruction - the London outpost from San Sebastian’s Juan Mari and Elena Arzak.

We commissioned Pixel Rain and I worked with them to create a couple of top down recipe films (before they were a thing) and a brand film.

Side note: a couple of year’s later after we finished working together I was in San Sebastian and popped in to see Elena just before service at the three Michelin-starred restaurant.

Despite accidentally breaking the dress code in shorts, Elena gave us a personal tour of the restaurant and the labs and a huge selection of dishes from the menu. Pure hospitality and an unbelievable experience.

Agency: MOFILM
Role: Agency producer

For this project, MOFILM asked their community of filmmakers to submit treatments which showed how people are connected through food.

My role was to work with MOFILM’s brilliant Executive Creative Director Trak to refine the treatments and then work with the producers to create the films.

Made in 2011 as one of my final projects in Cornwall. Still love these pies and still big fans of Trevor & Mark.

Client: Grumpies 
Role: Agency Producer
Agency: Barefoot Media
Filmmakers: Pixel Rain

Allow me a moment of nostalgia.

When looking at the glossy output of a YouTuber who is subscribed to in the millions, I am always fascinated to filter their films by oldest and watch the first film that they published and have allowed to remain live.

I really recommend you try it. The transformation is often astonishing.

Well, The Spooning was the first real film I ever produced and directed and have allowed to remain live and I wanted to pay tribute to it here.

In 2008, I pulled the title ‘The Spooning’ and the genre ‘Romantic Disaster’ out of a hat as part of the Hastings Film Festival and this is what we came up with in 24 hours.

It didn’t win but has been seen over 550,000 on YouTube and had a sizeable fan base in the Middle East. I think it is still the most viewed organically viewed film I have ever made. I’m not sure what that says for the rest of the films I have ever made but there you go.

It would have provided a small level of income from advertising, but we have forgotten the password to the YouTube account it is hosted on.