VANQUISH CARBON
Aston Martin
CREDITS
DIRECTOR
Dan Constantinou
PRODUCER
Paul Denchfield
VXF
Darian Weir
BRIEFING
In late 2014, iconic brand Aston Martin were to launch their new Special Edition car: the Vanquish Carbon Edition. Aston tasked Fin to support their marketing campaign by making a dynamic film highlighting the car's unique package of carbon fibre and styled, dark features.
The overall marketing creative utilised a similarly styled, dark theme, with the car revealing itself from the shadows. The stills element of the product's marketing, shot in the backstreets of London at night, needed to be reflected in our film to synergise with the greater campaign.
Owing to the product's substantial marketing push, we only had two cars available, for one day, to capture what we needed.

Fin's custom-built Motion Picture Pursuit Vehicle



Fin's custom-built Motion Picture Pursuit Vehicle
The concept was to shoot at night in disused Victorian rail arches in Southwark, London. This allowed us to reveal the car from the shadows, hide it behind the arches and race along the main tunnel.
Because we were showing two cars in this promo, we effectively had double the number of shots to cover both cars. To ensure this was achieved in our short time-frame, two crews worked simultaneously, capturing both cars in different locations. Significantly, the promo included a series of chase car sequences, shot through the narrow tunnels. These were filmed on our brand new Fin Pursuit Car - specially designed and developed by us for high-speed car-to-car filming.
Filming below London’s busy rail network in Victorian rail arches inevitably gave us significant challenges with both lighting and space. The two teams worked in separate locations, as far apart as possible, to prevent any light leaks between set-ups. Using the RED Epic to shoot large 4-5k plates, we used our fast prime lenses to gather as much light in the scene as possible. A combination of LED panel lighting and 2k Fresnels were used as location power was minimal.
Astons are typically quite wide, which is normally fine for road use, but filming them driving at high speed through a tunnel made things even trickier! With only 45cm of clearance either side of the cars, the two stunt drivers certainly earned their money after a night of fast driving with our chase car in tow. The site was fully closed off for our operations and the shoot wrapped in good time with no incidents.
The film was edited in-house on Avid with effects created in Flame by Darian Weir. The on-location sound effects and music tracks were added-in during the final mix here at Fin. A longer edit was produced for internal communications, with the shorter promo piece released worldwide for online viewing.