Our finished glass recycling web film for Sibelco deceptively simply follows the original storyboard concept, but for it to look as good as it does took a lot of hard work and patience.
High speed filming is all about capturing moments that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye – through doing this it’s possible to unearth beauty in mundane objects – like those bottles we chuck out for recycling once a week.
To prove the concept we conducted a test shoot which involved a pellet gun, protective screens, safety goggles, an empty wine bottle, a simple lighting set up and the £140,000 Phantom high speed camera, filming at 2500 frames per second. The result was immediately mesmerising.
The test shoot was swiftly followed by approval to complete the job. So, we gathered all the empty bottles we could muster (not too difficult, we’re a sociable bunch), together with processed glass fragments from Sibelco’s Antwerp plant and spent another day making the high speed magic happen. The hard working two-woman Art Department donned safety gloves and goggles and made sure every shot looked exactly right before the camera rolled.
The shots themselves are, as you can imagine, over in an instant. Filming at 250 fps is 10 times slower than filming in real time, so 1 second of action becomes 10 seconds of beautiful 4K footage. Once we started shooting pellets at the bottles a single second would be stretched to the best part of two minutes. At these speeds and resolutions every aspect of the impact is revealed and the tiniest airborn glass fragments are visible.
The result is a ballet in broken glass, carefully edited to tell the story purely with imagery and minimal text. It’s a beautiful, absorbing piece. Our client, Rob Sproston, Director of Communications for Sibelco loved the result which is used to reinforce the company’s unique expertise in glass recycling globally:
“Wow!!!
Really can’t believe what a stunning result you’ve achieved …!
Thanks – awesome job!”
Credits:
Director: Jordi Vidal Oliveras
Writer/Producer: Andy Porter
Director of Photography: Paul Lilley
Camera Operator/DIT: Matt Jones
Camera Assistant: Chester Lilley
Art Department: Alexa Hartle
Art Assistant: Hannah Porter
Production Manager: Sarah Swanston