ASTON MARTIN DB9
Aston Martin
CREDITS
DIRECTOR-PRODUCER
Paul Denchfield
Dan Constantinou
AGENCY
Fin London
DOP
James Buck
CAMERA
Tom Webster
VFX
Darian Weir
BRIEFING
Aston Martin approached us to make a series of films to celebrate their flagship car: the DB9. The goal was to convey the current technological and design advances in the latest iteration of the car, while also exploring the history and legacy of the DB marque.
The films were shown on Aston Martin's website, as well as in their global dealership rooms. Online, they were to be released as webisodes every week. Working closely with the Aston marketing team, we created 4 dynamic films that would summarise 4 keys aspects of the car: Design, Engineering, History and Future.
Although each film can be viewed independently, the series has an overall narrative based on a DB9 alpine journey - highlighting the car's GT qualities. To show the progression of the DB9 lineage, we were fortunate to have a newly-restored DB5 (made famous by Bond), providing stunning footage of both cars, side-by-side, driving around the twisty mountain roads.
We filmed on location in the beautiful French alps and in a motion control studio shoot in London, while interviews were shot at Aston's Headquarters in Gaydon, Warwickshire. The film had to tie-together all of these elements concisely and maintain a sense of the car's historic journey.
We used a variety of equipment to shoot the webisodes, including a few new fin toys, with which we ran real-world tests while filming. One of the most interesting additions coming out from R&D was our new remote aerial filming platform - custom-designed and built by Fin. This allowed us to capture some stunning helicopter shots in places we couldn't get a real chopper, while - at the same time - filming in 4K.
The RED Epic was our main camera for the car-to-car filming (mounted on a jib with remote head) as well as the motion control studio shots. A selection of Canon DSLRs and Go Pros were also used by the second unit. The films were edited in-house on Avid, with graphic elements completed in Flame and Smoke.